The exclusion of prison informant evidence for unreliability in New Zealand
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Prison informant or ‘jailhouse snitch’ evidence is a notoriously unreliable category of evidence. In light of reliability concerns, the New Zealand Supreme Court has adopted a progressive approach to the exclusion of prison informant evidence, centred on greater use of general exclusionary provisions as a threshold of reliability for the admission of suspect evidence. In so doing, the court has shifted the emphasis from deference to the jury as arbiter of ultimate reliability and towards more robust judicial gatekeeping as a safeguard against false testimony. This article critically analyses the New Zealand approach, including by way of comparison with Canada, Australia and England and Wales. The New Zealand approach is presented as a principled and important example of adapting fundamental evidentiary principles and provisions in line with emerging social science evidence. However, in light of the general concerns surrounding this class of evidence, ultimately further safeguards are still needed
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".