Informants process questioned

When innocent people go to prison, ‘in-custody witnesses’ are often to blame. Some lawmakers want to change that.

When Demetrius Smith went to prison in 2008 for a murder he didn’t commit, a jailhouse informant was a damning witness.

Another exonerated man, Clarence Shipley Jr. of Baltimore, spent 27 years in prison — after a suspect arrested in a series of vehicle thefts falsely fingered him as a killer.

And the city of Baltimore paid out $9 million to another innocent man, James Owens, who spent two decades in prison. His murder conviction was based, in part, on the unreliable testimony of a prisoner who claimed Owens confessed to him.

Time and again, when innocent people go to prison in Maryland, false testimony from jailhouse informants plays a role. In the world of Maryland corrections — where detainees want reduced sentences and prosecutors are eager for help to land convictions — the incentive to lie about a fellow prisoner is so strong that additional protections must be placed in the law, some are now arguing in the Maryland legislature.

“This is an ongoing problem,” Michele

Nethercott, director of the University of Baltimore’s Maryland Innocence Project, says of false testimony from jailhouse informants. “Many of them have a career in which they get arrested, they get concessions, they provide information . ... People are convicted on this unreliable false testimony.”

Maryland would join a growing number of states passing laws to place greater scrutiny on “in-custody witnesses” under proposed legislation before the General Assembly. Such laws force prosecutors to disclose to defense lawyers any deals cut with informants; track an informant’s record of testifying in other cases; and

PRISON,