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Informants And Jailhouse Snitches

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Informants/Jailhouse Snitches In addition to the confession tapes, the prosecution uses six informants and jailhouse snitches who all claim that either Tommy Ward or Karl Fontenot confessed to the crimes in prison. Of the six, two of them have incentives to lie on the stand. The first three informants the prosecution calls to the stand are "members of Ada's running crowd" Mayer, 1987, p. 279). The defence, though, establishes that one of those three witnesses has a substantial reason to testify against Tommy Ward; the "witness had been let out of prison term early" in exchange for a testimony against Ward. The fourth informant the prosecution calls to the stand, Jim Allen, gives a testimony incriminating Ward, but it contradicts with the narrative …show more content…

Jailhouse snitches are inherently unreliable because they have nothing to lose by giving false testimonies. One third of the prosecution's informants and snitches were given a reward for their testimony against the defendants. One of the informants got out of prison early, while Holland's charges against her were dropped. It is hard to accept the statements of individuals who have good reason to lie; it makes their testimonies unreliable. There does not seem to be incentive for the other four informants, but the circumstances surrounding their testimonies is highly suspect. The members of "Ada's running crowd" Mayer, 1987, p. 279) conveniently do not remember specific dates in their testimonies, only that Tommy Ward had long hair at the time of Denice Haraway's disappearance, "and that he once owned a knife" Mayer, 1987, p. 279). It is also mighty convenient for the prosecution that Ward confessed to Jim Allen after Ward's repeated and unwavering assertions of innocence, and that Leonard Keith Martin just happened to overhear Karl Fontenot confessing to himself. Although the informants' and snitches' testimonies seem legitimate and incriminating, upon further inspection they do not appear to be as reliable as the prosecution would hope. While one cannot completely discount the testimonies, their reliability is not sound, and there is reasonable doubt that the testimonies are false; there …show more content…

The investigators use them to identify the suspects and present a narrative of what happened, but both the identifications and narratives are flawed. Karen Wise, a worker at the J.P.'s convenience store had seen two men in her store "acting weird" Mayer, 1987, p. 29) the night of Denice Haraway's disappearance. The police sketch artist made composite drawings of her descriptions, and Lenny Timmons, a witness of the disappearance, confirmed that one of the composite sketches was at least "in the ballpark" Mayer, 1987, p. 29) in resemblance to whom he saw at McAnally's the night of the disappearance. The main problem with this identification is the accuracy of the drawing. Timmons does not confirm the second face, and the one he does confirm is only a broad, general likeness. "In the ballpark" does not mean the drawing is a portrait of the suspect. It means that the sketch resembles the suspect enough that Timmons sees some familiarity between the drawing and the person he saw. Timmons identification, though, is not very reliable. He only saw the man and woman, who is supposedly Denice, for a second, as he was entering, and they leaving. Seeing a face for a few seconds is not enough to make a positive identification of the same person days later. Even during the trial, Timmons said that on a scale of one to ten of his confidence in his identification of Tommy, he was at "about a six" Mayer,

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