Jailhouse confession

A jailhouse confession is a confession to a crime given by a prisoner to another inmates while in custody. It has been noted that "Jailhouse informants who recount their fellow prisoners' 'confessions' are often used by the state as witnesses in criminal prosecutions", although it has "become public knowledge that such confessions are easily fabricated", or may constitute a false confession. Jailhouse informants, who report hearsay (admissions against penal interest) which they claim to have heard while the accused is in pretrial detention, usually in exchange for sentence reductions or other inducements, have been the focus of particular controversy. Some examples of their use are in connection with Stanley Williams, Cameron Todd Willingham, Gerald Stano, Thomas Silverstein, Marshall "Eddie" Conway, and a suspect in the disappearance of Etan Patz. The Innocence Project has stated that 15% of all wrongful convictions later exonerated because of DNA results were accompanied by false testimony by jailhouse informants. 50% of murder convictions exonerated by DNA were accompanied by false testimony by jailhouse informants.
Jailhouse confessions may be discovered through means other than informants, such as placing a covert listening device in a subject's jail cell and monitoring their communications to see whether they make a self-incriminating statement. In the 1977 case of "United States v. Hearst", the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit held that the government's secret use of an electronic recording device to record a prisoner's conversations did not violate the Sixth Amendment to the United States Constitution.