In my previous blog I wrote about the case of Cameron Todd Willingham who was put to death by the State of Texas on February 17, 2004 on what many believe was faulty forensic evidence. In addition to the faulty evidence issue in the Willingham case, there was the jailhouse snitch named Johnny E. Webb who testified that Willingham told the snitch he had intentionally killed his three children by fire to cover the physical abuse of one of the children by his wife.

            Webb’s story, in all probability, was a lie. As pointed out in my Willingham blog, Cameron Todd was an angry man who took every opportunity to tell people he was innocent and was being “persecuted” by state authorities. Whether or not Willingham was actually guilty of the horrible crime remains a subject of intense debate by fire forensic experts. What has never been subject to debate was Willingham’s hardnosed attitude that he had been done wrong by being charged and convicted of capital murder. He turned down a deal offered by prosecutors to plead to a life sentence to avoid the death sentence, so he was not about to tell some jailhouse snitch that he committed the crime. And Willingham was no stranger to jails, having been convicted of at least three felonies. He was aware of jailhouse snitches.

            Webb’s story itself was implausible. He testified that Willingham confessed to him one day as they spoke through what the Chicago Tribune called “a chuckhole in a steel door at the county jail.” It didn’t happen. Prosecutors got the jury to believe, and would have the general public continue to believe, that the angry, victimized Willingham spoke through a “chuckhole” to an inmate he didn’t even really know except by name only and gave him an admission of guilt to killing his three children. That simply did not happen. It defies not only all the rules of normal human behavior but even more it defies the basic tenets of inmate behavior. Inmates simply don’t talk to each other through chuckholes in solid steel doors about their crimes. Inmates survive by paranoia. They assume everyone is listening to their conversations to “get the goods” on them. They may share intimate details with each other in private whispered conversations but never through chuckholes in a door. As I said, Willingham’s alleged admission of guilty to Webb did not happen.

            So not only was Willingham convicted on the basis of widely discredited fire forensic evidence, he was also convicted on the basis of perjured testimony as well from a jailhouse snitch. And if Texas State Senator Juan “Chuy” Hinojosa has his way, this kind of travesty of justice will never happen again in a Texas courtroom. The senator has introduced a bill that would require prosecutors to corroborate the testimony of jailhouse snitches like Johnny E. Webb.

            This legislation is certainly needed in the nation’s most prolific death penalty state. In 2005 the Northwestern University School of Law’s Center on Wrongful Conviction released a study titled “The Snitch System” which found that 51 of the convictions in the 111 death-row exonerations at the time of the study involved the use of jailhouse snitches. Closer to home on the jailhouse snitch issue, a November 24, 2007 online “Associated Content” article titled “Death Row Inmates Claim Jailhouse Snitch Testimony Got Them The Death Sentence,”  authored by a writer named “Dee,” reported that the author had been contacted by mail by four Texas inmates—three on death row and one serving a life sentence—who claimed they had been wrongfully convicted based on the testimony of jailhouse snitches utilized by the former controversial Harris County prosecutor, Kelly Seigler.

            One of the condemned inmates, Ronald Pribble, who wrote Dee charged that Seigler had “instructed [Michael] Beckcom and other jailhouse informants to befriend Pribble, and get information that could be used against him in court. Pribble claims the information was fabricated, and he was falsely convicted on the testimony of men who received a reduction in his sentence for snitching. Pribble alleges at his Capital murder trial Beckmon lied and said the two men were good friends and that Pribble ‘bragged about the shooting.’ He said his attorney referred to Beckcoms testimony as ‘a dime store novel’.”

            One of the other informants in Pribble’s case was an inmate named “Nathan Foreman” who also was an informant in the case of Hermilo Herrero. Herrero was also prosecuted by Seigler for capital murder and received a life sentence. He claims to be innocent and says another person has confessed to the murder. The Associated Content article then sets forth some disturbing facts about his case:

            “Herrero claims in his letter to me that inmate Jesse G. Moreno and three other inmates named Rafael Dominguez, Nathan Foreman and Eddie Gomez conspired with D.A. Seigler to charge him for murder. Herrero claims Moreno had an interview with Kelly Seigler in 2002, and made a recorded statement as to a ‘so called’ confession that he had made to him and two other inmates. Herrero has documents of the recorded interview as well as the trial transcripts.

            “Herrero says what ties his case to that of Pribbles is jail house informant Nathan Foreman and prosecutor Kelly Seigler. At the time Moreno claims Herrero confessed to him Foreman and Dominguez, in 1999, Herrero claims Foreman was not at Beaumont at the time in question. He did not arrive there until March 2000. Herrero claims the statement from both Moreno and Dominquez was changed when they realised [sic] their mistake. He says that Foreman never testified on either him or Pribble. Herrero can prove this testimony with documents, and can prove that Foreman was lying, as well as the other two informants.

            “Herrero claims the first time he ever met Pribble was when they were both placed in a holding tank waiting to be picked up by the Sheriff’s department. Upon his return about ten months later he was made aware of how his and Pribble’s case were connected. He then took it upon himself to contact Pribble’s lawyer. Mr. Gaiser. Herrero’s wife contacted Mr. Gaiser to get his address, and explained the similarities of both men’s cases, and mentioned how Herrero could possibly help in Pribble’s case. Gaiser told her he would visit Herrero but never did according to Herrero.

            “”Herrero also claims that his own trial lawyer Dan Cogdell was informed that a man named James Elizade Jr. had called the Herrero’s and told them Herrero was innocent and that he would testify on his behalf. Cogdell waited five months and it wasn’t until one day before Herrero’s trial that Cogdell decided the jury wouldn’t believe Elizade, although he never even visited him to hear what he had to say. Herrero wrote to me and said ‘I feel that Codgell, Gaiser and Seigler were all working together to hang me and Pribble out to dry;,”

            It’s difficult to assess either the accuracy or validity of what Herrero presented to Associated Content. While it sounds implausible that two defense attorneys would jointly conspire with a prosecutor to hang their clients out to dry, Seigler’s involvement with so many jail house snitches in four separate murder cases is ethically troubling to say the least. One would have to believe she had a “pipeline” directly into the Harris County jailhouse snitch system and all its snitches possessed a civic duty to bring wrongdoers to justice.

            While I seriously question the credibility of some of the information provided by the four Texas inmates to Associated Content, I concur with the article’s conclusion that “if a defendant is to receive the death sentence, all testimony used should be truthful, and all measures should be made to enforce this. Jailhouse snitches receive both monetary rewards and leniency in their own sentences, and sometimes snitch to put the blame on someone else. These reasons alone should put a ban on all jailhouse snitching. Their testimony is unreliable and sometimes fabricated.”

            The jailhouse snitch system gained widespread law enforcement acceptance after Floyd Wells fingered Richard “Dick” Hickock and Perry Edward Smith for the November 15, 1959 murders of the Herb Clutter family in Holcomb, Kansas. The case, made famous in Truman Capote’s best selling book “In Cold Blood,” was cracked after Kansas State Penitentiary inmate Wells contacted authorities and told them he had falsely told Hickock years earlier in a prison conversation that Herb Clutter kept large amounts of money in a safe in his home. Wells’ testimony, which was strongly motivated by a $1,000 reward offered by a local newspaper, was key in sending Hickock and Smith to the gallows in April 1965. The authorities had absolutely no leads in the case and probably would never have connected it to Hickock and Smith had it not been for Wells.

            From that point on in criminal investigations, law enforcement agencies began relying heavily on jailhouse snitches to crack difficult cases. Murder cases with little or no physical evidence or shaky eyewitness identifications could be bolstered with jailhouse snitch testimony. And if law enforcement authorities did not have a legitimate snitch like Floyd Wells, they simply primed selected inmates with information about a given case, promised them sentencing leniency and special jailhouse privileges and used them to convict innocent people, sending many off to death row and some into death chambers like the state of Texas did to Cameron Todd Willingham.

            Hopefully the legislation being pushed by Sen. Hinojosa will become law in Texas. The state’s prolific death machine is flawed enough with wrongful convictions based on mistaken identifications and manufactured forensic evidence. Corroboration of testimony from jailhouse snitches would go a long way on reducing the chances of innocent people, perhaps like Willingham, being executed by a death machine fueled unethical prosecutors and intolerant judges..