
The Importance of Cigarette Receipts in a Thirty-Two-Year-Old Murder Case - lermontov
https://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/the-importance-of-cigarette-receipts-murder-conviction
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danso
Among the interesting aspects of this case (e.g. the witness compelled to give
false testimony) is the surprising endurance of paper records – when they can
be found. Apparently, the prosecutor who is defending the convictions didn't
realize that a particular file for this decades-old case had been moved out of
the police precinct to the Municipal Archives:

> _She had asked an investigator to fetch it from the police precinct, she
> told the judge, and after being informed that it wasn’t there, she had gone
> looking for it herself. Last December, she reported that she had finally
> found the file “because I personally crawled through a disgusting basement
> in the police precinct.”_

> _Keenan appears not to have known about the existence of another file: a
> tattered legal envelope filled with Goldstein’s files that had been sent to
> the Municipal Archives. When I found it there recently, the envelope
> contained numerous manila folders with crime-scene photos, witness
> statements, and notes about the case that Goldstein had handwritten on legal
> pads. Buried inside a file marked “Witnesses,” there was also an expense
> report he had filled out for costs related to the trial. One expense, for
> $17.41, was for “cigarettes and soap for inmate.” The attached receipt,
> which was from a pharmacy near the courthouse, was dated July 8th—the same
> day that Burns testified._

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alphabettsy
There have been countless instances of criminal witnesses giving false
testimony for consideration.

I recognize that in some cases it might be the only way to convict, but the
fact that so many people have spent decades in prison only to later be
exonerated inspires little confidence in this practice.

Rape and murder convictions get all the attention and resources, but certainly
there are countless lesser crimes with the same problem.

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cafard
Something around 30 years ago, an inmate in the LA County jails was recorded
on tape explaining how he put himself in a position to be able to testify
falsely. I assume that was one of the factors that led to a grand jury
investigation: [https://drive.google.com/file/d/0Bx-
Cz6-HaJA_U240RVBvQkxMNEE...](https://drive.google.com/file/d/0Bx-
Cz6-HaJA_U240RVBvQkxMNEE/view)

