Resumen de Like Putting Lipstick on a Pig: Why the History of Crime Control Should Compel the Prohibition of Incentivized Witness Testimony Should Compel the Prohibition of Incentivized Witness Testimony Under Fundamental Fairness Principles Under Fundamental Fairness Principles
Among Western nations, American courts remain uniquely permissive to the routine law enforcement practice of offering witnesses incentives to testify for the State in criminal trials. Despite laws and ethical rules roundly prohibiting the practice and recurrent skepticism of incentivized testimony in the English common law tradition, American judges have excused the practice based on pragmatism, developing legal fictions to exempt prosecutors from the general prohibition. However, basic common sense, backed by recent empirical scholarship, should alarm participants in the criminal legal system to a severely heightened risk of perjury wherever the prospect of reward compels testimony. Whether law enforcement offers these incentives in the form of cash payments, material rewards, reduced sentencing for co-defendants and so-called “jailhouse informants,” or merely relocation, they influence witnesses through unfair inducements. Paradoxically, these inducements are prohibited to the defense and categorically prohibited as bribery in all other legal contexts
