PASSAGE OF THE DAY: "Case in point: the 1974 conviction of Laurence Adams
for the murder of a Boston subway porter. The prosecution’s star
witnesses were Wyatt Moore, already facing felony charges, and his
sister. They testified at trial that Adams had confessed his guilt to
both of them. Moore was released from prison the day after Adams’s
conviction. His sister later recanted her testimony, saying she just
wanted to get her brother out of jail. Their stories were complete
fabrications, but that would take three decades to prove. Adams was
exonerated in 2004 and won a federal civil rights lawsuit against the
city of Boston for $2.1 million. Another recently exonerated Massachusetts man, Gary Cifizzari of Taunton, had been convicted of the 1979 rape and murder of his great aunt. The DNA evidence that helped free Cifizzari was matched to Michael J. Giroux,
who in addition to murdering his landlord in 1991 turned out to be
something of a serial snitch himself — not in Cifizzari’s case, but in a
long list of others.:
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EDITORIAL"Jailhouse informants must be reined in," published by The Boston Globe on February 15, 2020.
GIST: "Jailhouse
informants have probably been around for as long as there have been
jails and inmates willing to trade information for a favor or two —
including more privileges or a shorter sentence. “Incentivized
informants” is the legal term of art, but too often they also have “a
strong incentive to lie,” said Michelle Feldman, state campaigns
director for the Innocence Project. That explains why, according to the
project’s figures, 16 percent of DNA exonerations involved false
testimony by informants. Broader studies of wrongful convictions put the figure as high as 46 percent. Innocent
people have spent decades in prison while the guilty remained free, and
often the victims of those informants never see justice either — a
lose-lose-lose for the criminal justice system.
Case in point: the 1974 conviction of Laurence Adams
for the murder of a Boston subway porter. The prosecution’s star
witnesses were Wyatt Moore, already facing felony charges, and his
sister. They testified at trial that Adams had confessed his guilt to
both of them. Moore was released from prison the day after Adams’s
conviction. His sister later recanted her testimony, saying she just
wanted to get her brother out of jail. Their stories were complete
fabrications, but that would take three decades to prove. Adams was
exonerated in 2004 and won a federal civil rights lawsuit against the
city of Boston for $2.1 million. Another recently exonerated Massachusetts man, Gary Cifizzari of Taunton, had been convicted of the 1979 rape and murder of his great aunt. The DNA evidence that helped free Cifizzari was matched to Michael J. Giroux,
who in addition to murdering his landlord in 1991 turned out to be
something of a serial snitch himself — not in Cifizzari’s case, but in a
long list of others.
“This
man became an arm of the police,” Radha Natarajan, executive director
of the New England Innocence Project, told the Globe. In 1994, a state
police trooper offered up Giroux as a possible informant to a Worcester
police detective, noting, “He calls me every week.” Giroux
died a free man in 2014. There’s no telling how many innocent people he
helped send to prison while avoiding accountability for murdering
Cifizzari’s relative. So
how to weed out serial informants like Giroux? And how to give judges
and juries the tools they need to evaluate testimony from informants who
police and prosecutors are able to “incentivize” — whether currently in
prison or not? “Judges
understand how this works, activists and lawyers understand it,
everyone but jurors, Feldman said. “It’s not always apparent to jurors
that there’s a benefit [to the person testifying].” A state bill filed by Senator Joseph Boncore of Winthrop, and supported by the Innocence Project, would provide several significant guardrails around such testimony. It
would set up a kind of registry of jailhouse informants — a database
that would list the criminal history of an informant, along with any
“deals, promises, inducements or benefits” made by prosecutors now or
“in the future.” A serial informant like Giroux would be suspect — at
least by honest prosecutors and judges — fairly early on, rather than
being passed around by police like a bowl of M&Ms. The
bill provides for “enhanced disclosure” of any inducements on the
table. And informants would be subject to a pretrial reliability
hearing, in much the same way certain expert witnesses are now.
“It’s ironic that actual experts are subject to more scrutiny than informants,” Feldman said.A number of other states,
most recently Connecticut, have adopted some variation of the law.
Connecticut’s includes an informant-tracking system and pretrial
reliability hearings. In
other jurisdictions, like Illinois and Orange County, Calif., such
legal reforms followed notorious scandals involving informants. In
Oklahoma and Florida, it took appellate court decisions to bring about
changes to criminal procedure codes. It
shouldn’t take another scandal — surely that $2.1 million Boston had to
pay out for the wrongful conviction of Adams would be lesson enough to
spur action on Beacon Hill. Bringing more data transparency and rigor to
such cases can only be good for the justice system. Yes, lying jailhouse informants are a part of our history — a part that a modern criminal justice system can live without."
The entire editorial can br read at:
https://www.bostonglobe.com/2020/02/15/opinion/tainted-jailhouse-informants-must-be-reined/?event=event25-----------------------------------------------------------------------
Read also 'Portrait of exonerees' at the link below, in which ProPublica Investigative Reporter Pamela Colloff sets out with Propublica Research Editor Katie Zavadski to show readers the full impact of jailhouse informants on the criminal justice system by interviewing and photographing people who had been wrongly convicted with their testimony - and by showing exactly which rewards these so-called informants had received in return. It's a powerful, instructive piece of photo journalism. HL. (The goal of all the work we do at ProPublica is to write about issues of public interest in a way that makes readers care. I couldn’t think of any better way to do this than to feature the stories and portraits of the people who had paid the biggest price when prosecutors relied on untrue testimony from jailhouse informants. "Katie and I reached out to and interviewed 10 men who were wrongly convicted with false jailhouse informant testimony. Their stories were strikingly similar. In many cases, prosecutors faced pressure to win convictions in high-stakes cases where the evidence was thin. ProPublica’s design director, David Sleight, commissioned photographers to take portraits of these men. The exonerees’ stories show how pervasive this problem is. They hail from all across the country: from California to Kentucky, Illinois to Pennsylvania. They come from big cities and small towns. They are black, white and Latino. Their cases span four decades — dating back as far as 1982 and ending in an exoneration as recently as last year.")
https://features.propublica.org/jailhouse-informant-exonerees/jailhouse-informant-false-testimony-exoneree-portraits/
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PUBLISHER'S NOTE: I am monitoring this case/issue. Keep your eye on the Charles Smith Blog for reports on developments. The Toronto Star, my previous employer for more than twenty incredible years, has put considerable effort into exposing the harm caused by Dr. Charles Smith and his protectors - and into pushing for reform of Ontario's forensic pediatric pathology system. The Star has a "topic" section which focuses on recent stories related to Dr. Charles Smith. It can be found at: http://www.thestar.com/topic/charlessmith. Information on "The Charles Smith Blog Award"- and its nomination process - can be found at: http://smithforensic.blogspot.com/2011/05/charles-smith-blog-award-nominations.html Please send any comments or information on other cases and issues of interest to the readers of this blog to: hlevy15@gmail.com. Harold Levy: Publisher: The Charles Smith Blog;
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FINAL WORD: (Applicable to all of our wrongful conviction cases): "Whenever there is a wrongful conviction, it exposes errors in our criminal legal system, and we hope that this case — and lessons from it — can prevent future injustices."
Lawyer Radha Natarajan:
Executive Director: New England Innocence Project;
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