Jailhouse Informants

Offers a new understanding of jailhouse informants and the role they play in wrongful convictions Jailhouse informants—witnesses who testify in a criminal trial, often in exchange for some incentive—are particularly persuasive to jurors. A jailhouse informant usually claims to have heard the defendant confess to a crime while they were incarcerated together. Research shows that such testimony increases the likelihood of a guilty verdict. But it is also a leading contributor to wrongful convictio