Sometimes the Snitch Recants
Bibliographic record
Abstract
We analyzed the role that jailhouse informants have played in DNA exoneration cases. Thus, for the first 375 DNA exoneration cases compiled by the Innocence Project (IP), we reviewed the IP information relevant to jailhouse informant testimony. We supplemented the information from IP with that from the National Registry of Exonerations (NRE) and the Convicting the Innocent (CTI) databases. We found that 15% of these cases included jailhouse informant testimony. In 13% of the cases, the only evidence supporting a conviction was the word of the jailhouse informant. We also found that in 24% of cases which had at least one jailhouse informant, the informant recanted, and in 13% percent of these cases, the jailhouse informant had provided the only evidence supporting a conviction. There has recently been an effort in some jurisdictions for reform with regard to informant testimony. Reforms have taken many forms (e.g., pretrial hearings, jury instructions). While states should continue to consider adopting procedures in an effort to curb the reliance on unreliable informants (and researchers should continue to test what reforms will best achieve these goals), we recommend that any reform with regard to informants should include a consideration of recanting informants.
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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 | 0.002 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.003 |
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; both teacher heads agree on what is shown here.
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".