Reducing Wrongful Convictions: California Assembly to Vote on Bill Requiring Corroboration of Jailhouse Informants

[courtesy of California Progress Report]

By John F. Terzano
President
The Justice Project

Harold Hall was only 18 years old when he was sent to prison. He spent nearly two decades of his life in a California prison for crimes he did not commit.

Hall was wrongfully convicted of double murder in 1985 based in part on evidence provided by a jailhouse informant who fabricated a confession Hall allegedly made to him.

Jailhouse informant testimony is widely regarded as the least reliable form of testimony in the criminal justice system, but unfortunately in Mr. Hall's case and numerous others, uncorroborated testimony from unscrupulous jailhouse informants, or "snitches," is still used by prosecutors to obtain convictions.

According to a San Francisco Magazine study, unreliable testimony of informants was a factor in approximately 20% of all wrongful convictions in California. This problem extends nationwide as shown in a study by The Center on Wrongful Convictions at Northwestern University School of Law, which identifies snitch testimony as the leading cause of wrongful convictions in U.S. capital cases.

Higher standards for admitting snitch testimony at trial must be put in place to protect innocent people like Mr. Hall from the consequences of unreliable, incentive-driven testimony. Best practices to safeguard against perjured testimony include:

• Mandatory, automatic pretrial disclosures of information related to jailhouse informant testimony

• Corroboration of the facts to which an informant testifies, special jury instructions

• Higher standards for the admissibility of snitch testimony at trial.

A vital piece of legislation for raising the standards of use for jailhouse informant testimony, is California Senate Bill 609, sponsored by Senator Majority Leader Gloria Romero (D-Los Angeles), which requires corroboration for jailhouse informants.