The use of jailhouse snitches has been a notorious sources of wrongful convictions.
On Monday, the state of California just took a large step in correcting that problem when Governor Jerry Brown signed a law that greatly restricts how jailhouse snitches may be used.
The Sac Bee’s Carol Williams wrote this story before Brown signed the bill into law (on the very last day he could do so) but Williams’ reporting lays the issue out nicely. Here are some clips:
No blood, fingerprints, weapon or other physical evidence was ever found to link Thomas L. Goldstein to the 1979 shotgun murder of John McGinest, a Long Beach neighbor he had never met.
Goldstein, then a 28-year-old draftsman, former Marine and part-time engineering student, had moved into a garage apartment near the murder scene just two days earlier and had only a couple of minor run-ins with the law for drunkenness and disturbing the peace to bring him to police attention.
Goldstein would nevertheless lose the next 25 years of his life to imprisonment on a wrongful conviction, secured by prosecutors who cut deals with a notorious jailhouse informant – aptly named Edward F. Fink – to testify that Goldstein had confessed to the murder.
Scandalous misuse of uncorroborated testimony by in-custody informants in the 1980s sent dozens to long prison terms for offenses that appellate courts later determined they never committed. But a bill passed by the state Legislature earlier this month and facing a Monday deadline for Gov. Jerry Brown to sign would prohibit future convictions based solely on the testimony of jailhouse informants, who often have something to gain by lying.
It’s been a long struggle to get the law changed, and the California District Attorneys Association and other tough-on-crime groups remain opposed to the law, which would block convictions in cases without corroborating testimony by uncompromised witnesses or forensic evidence to tie the defendant to the crime.
Williams also notes that Steve Cooley is one of the handful of prosecutors who has already taken steps to curb the use of jailhouse informants. Go Cooley!
BURL CAIN, THE BIBLE-WIELDING KING OF ANGOLA PRISON
Veteran journalist James Ridgeway writes for Mother Jones about Louisiana’s Angola prison and its near-mythic warden, Burl Cain.
It’s quite the story.