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The Justice Project on Snitch Testimony

By Steve Hall

The Justice Project's John Terzano posts, "Jailhouse Snitches Sabotage Justice with Unreliable Evidence," at Fire Dog Lake.Jailhouse "snitch" and informant witnesses often provide incriminating testimony during criminal proceedings in exchange for reduced sentences or other benefits. This practice provides powerful incentives for witnesses to lie, and makes their testimony notoriously unreliable. Despite this fact, police and prosecutors often use this highly unreliable form of evidence to secure convictions. The danger of this kind of testimony is not theoretical: in-custody informant testimony is a leading cause of documented wrongful convictions and a factor in over fifteen percent of the DNA exoneration cases nationally...continue to full post

Full post as published by StandDown Texas Project on April 02, 2010 (boomark / email).