Take it from Derrick Shiloh: There are huge benefits to becoming a jailhouse informant.
He was urged, he said, 32 years ago by a fellow detainee at the Duval County jail to join the informants who were planning to testify that they had heard Kenneth Hartley confess to the murder of Gino Mayhew, 17.
Shiloh, who had heard no such thing, declined – and ended up being sentenced to 15 years in prison for his part in an armed robbery. His co-defendant, Eric Brooks, did testify on behalf of the state in Hartley’s murder trial, which helped land the defendant on Death Row. Brooks was back on the street in a year.
It is no mystery why detainees will seize the chance to testify that they heard someone confess – whether true or not.
According to a report called “Informing Justice: The Disturbing Use of Jailhouse Informants,” the expectation of rewards creates a perverse incentive for informants to lie. On top of that, the tendency by prosecutors to hide the nature of those rewards from defense attorneys and juries can make effective cross-examination difficult, the report says.
The report was issued by The Innocence Project, which fights for the rights of the wrongly convicted. The organization looked at 367 exonerations stemming from the science of DNA and found that in nearly one of every five cases a jailhouse informant had claimed the ultimately exonerated defendant had confessed.
There is no DNA evidence that could undo Hartley’s conviction. His hopes of getting off Death Row hinge on getting a judge to listen to various former detainees who say the Duval County jail was honeycombed with snitches willing to lie in exchange for rewards – and that the state attorney’s office was “open for business.”
Duval’s nest of snitches
Larry Wynn was one of five men to sign affidavits alleging detainees openly plotted to provide false testimony against Hartley.
Wynn has been incarcerated by the Florida Department of Corrections since 1993, serving a life sentence for murder. Like Shiloh, he said he was encouraged by fellow detainees in the Duval jail to testify falsely against Hartley but “I did not go along with the script.”
He said snitching was commonplace then and everyone knew it.
“Officials would feed them information,” Wynn said, and detainees would huddle up to make sure their stories matched “The bold informants would talk openly while others would talk in secret,” he told The Tributary.
Tara Wildes, the chief over the jail back in 1991, said detainees had access to TV news and could comb through newspapers in search of information on new arrivals that might help in fashioning a narrative that could be useful to prosecutors.
Cracking down
In the years since Hartley’s conviction, the use of jailhouse informants has become more controversial – and restricted.
Florida Supreme Court Justice Barbara Pariente framed the issue in one case when she wrote: “I recognize that in some instances the State may have no alternative but to present the testimony of these informants in order to get a conviction. However, our experience in post-conviction motions in death penalty proceedings has demonstrated that these jailhouse informants [so-called‘ jailhouse snitches’] are often unreliable and untrustworthy.”
That’s a point of agreement between Pariente, who no longer sits on the conservative-leaning court, and Robin Maher, executive director of the Death Penalty Information Center.
“It’s one thing if defenders understand that witnesses are testifying in exchange for possible lenient treatment,” Maher said. “But it’s another level of harm when they’re never told and then defense attorneys don’t have the opportunity to cross-examine the informant about their true motivation and the jury can’t properly assess the witness’s credibility.”
A pack of liars
The Innocence Project’s report on exonerations catalogues an assortment of cases in which lying jailhouse informants put innocent people behind bars.
Among the scores of examples:
A woman named Ellen Reasonover – who escaped the death penalty by the vote of one juror – was freed in 1999 after 16 years in prison after a long-sought evidentiary hearing surfaced exculpatory evidence. The Dellwood, Missouri, woman’s case rested largely on a jailhouse informant’s lies that were later recanted.
And an Illinois man, James Kluppelberg, was freed after serving 25 years for a Chicago arson that killed a woman and five children. The case was overturned in 2012 after a jailhouse informant admitted he made up hearing her confess to win a reduction in his sentence. Kluppelberg, who said he was tortured by police, won a $9.3 million judgment from the city.
In Florida, Rudolph Holton went from Death Row to freedom in 2003 after a lying jailhouse informant changed his story.
No physical evidence linked Holton to the 1986 rape/murder of a 17-year-old girl in a Tampa crackhouse. But a jailhouse informant said Holton confessed to him about strangling the victim and setting her on fire.
Facing life in prison on his own charges, the informant ended up getting probation after he testified.
Years later, Holton’s appellate attorneys – including Linda McDermott, who is representing Kenneth Hartley – tracked down the informant, who admitted he made it up.
The informant got 15 years for perjury. Holton would end up going back to prison for attempted second-degree murder in a separate case.
Florida revised the standard for using jailhouse informants in 2016. The Supreme Court’s new rule of criminal procedure requires prosecutors to disclose the full circumstances of any statements made by jailhouse informants and whether they have been informants in past cases.
That reform came too late for Kenneth Hartley. He was more than 20 years into his stay on Florida’s Death Row, put there in large part by jailhouse informants whose ultimate rewards were not fully revealed to the jury.
This year, Kansas became the latest state to require that prosecutors fully disclose all deals made with jailhouse informants, and required the creation of a database to keep track of those who snitch repeatedly, as did one of the informants who testified against Hartley.
The Pete Coones Memorial Act is named for a man exonerated of murder in 2020. He spent 12 years in prison after a jailhouse informant testified falsely that he had confessed to the murder of a Kansas City, Kansas, couple. One hundred and eight days after his release, the father of five died of an illness that went untreated in prison.
This story was reported, written and edited by The Tributary, a non-profit investigative newsroom covering Florida. Senior Investigative Reporter Nichole Manna reviewed more than 65,000 pages of court documents – including court transcripts and detective and prosecutor notes – that she obtained through multiple record requests. She spoke to everyone involved in the case who is alive and was willing. This is part 3 of a 3 part series – to read its other parts, go to jaxtrib.org/cold-blooded.
This article first appeared on The Tributary and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.
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