INDIANAPOLIS — A bipartisan group of lawmakers is asking to study the issue of jailhouse informants ahead of the next legislative session.
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State Sen. Rodney Pol, D-Michigan City, along with three Democrats and a Republican, signed a letter to Senate Pro Tempore Rod Brady, a Republican, asking to study “the unreliable and secret use of incentivized jailhouse informants”.
“If you have information that’s valuable, people are going to use that information. Whether or not it’s true,” Sen. Pol told WRTV Investigates. “These jailhouse snitches will ultimately get that testimony into court and tip the scales in an unfair way.”
In March, I-Team’s Tim Spears on WRTV's sister station reported on claims that witnesses fabricated testimony to reduce their own sentences. Those claims have led to legal challenges in multiple murder cases in Northwest Indiana.
According to the Indiana Public Defenders Council (IPDC), jailhouse informants were involved in a third of Indiana’s known wrongful convictions that have been overturned by DNA evidence.
“This is a big issue, IPDC Legal Counsel Zach Stock said in an interview. “A normal witness is afraid of perjury; there’s little incentive to lie. You’re a jailhouse informant, perhaps doing a lot of time yourself; a perjury charge doesn’t scare you as much. And you have every incentive to lie.”
Stock said reporting has been “invaluable” in creating discussion on the topic. “Without the media coverage, there’s no way to shine a light on this to allow the general public to know.”
The IPDC has joined the Notre Dame Exoneration Justice Clinic and the Innocence Project to call for a series of reforms on the use of jailhouse informants. The groups are calling for legislation to require pretrial hearings on the credibility of jailhouse informants, special jury instructions ahead of their testimony, and recordkeeping of an informant’s history as a witness.
Currently, Indiana has no system to track how often prosecutors use someone in custody as a witness.
“The problem is that the prosecutors themselves don’t even know how many times this jailhouse informant has cooperated with a prosecution in another jurisdiction,” Stock said.
SEE ALSO: Marion County prosecutor believes use of jailhouse informants needs to be reviewed
If approved as a study topic, a committee would investigate the issue and explore possible reforms that could be included in future legislation. Spokespersons for House and Senate Republicans tell WRTV Investigates legislative caucus leaders are still reviewing proposed study committee topics.
“At the end of the day, this isn’t a partisan issue,” Pol said. “I don’t think anybody wants to make sure that people that aren’t supposed to be in jail go to jail.”
Pol said that whether or not the Legislative Council chooses to study the use of jailhouse informants, one of his top priorities is to support legislation on the issue.
