![]() ![]() He is a skilled forger who, while he ran a legitimate business buying and selling organic beef, primarily enriched himself by passing bad checks on the accounts of others and using forged documents by 2003 he had faced criminal charges in four Western states. Kimball was sexually abused in his teens, which led to a suicide attempt and a life of crime. The agent who oversaw him during this period was disciplined he insists he was not the only one responsible for enabling Kimball. Almost none of the information he gave the bureau was of any use in prosecuting other crimes, and much of it later proved false the case greatly embarrassed the bureau. For the first year of his murder activity, he worked as an informant for the FBI, which both paid him and protected him from facing justice over some of his fraud schemes. Scott Lee Kimball (born September 21, 1966) is a convicted serial killer, con man and fraudster from Boulder County, Colorado, who murdered at least four people over a two-year period investigators strongly suspect him in as many as 21 other unsolved killings. "May take a closer look at it next year."īushnell said until this bill is passed, there is no way of tracking how often jailhouse informants are being used in Kansas.United States Penitentiary, Coleman, Sumter County, Florida ![]() “There is another year of this biennium,” he wrote in an email. ![]() Rick Wilborn, the committee’s co-chair, said the Judiciary Committee “does not plan to work any bills in committee.” The Senate Committee on Judiciary will reconvene the week in May, but Sen. ”Prosecutors are required to turn over any sort of evidence that would show they have received the deal, but oftentimes, for jailhouse informants, they don’t receive the deal until after they testify, so there is nothing to turn over and it can be completely unreliable." “The big issue is jailhouse informants typically in coming forward are doing so to get a deal,” Bushnell said. So far, nine states have passed laws to regulate jailhouse witness testimony.Įach of the state’s laws address different parts of the legal process, such as requiring pre-trial hearings about the witness' reliability or requiring prosecutors to keep a database of jailhouse witnesses. "States around the county are looking at it and jurisdictions around the country are looking at it." “As we’ve studied more and more the causes of wrongful convictions, it’s become clear jailhouse informant testimony is an issue," Midwest Innocence Project Director Tricia Rojo Bushnell said. The bill never made it out of the Senate Committee on Judiciary. The Kansas House unanimously passed a bill that would require prosecutors to disclose specific evidence related to jailhouse witnesses to defense attorneys. “Perhaps if this bill would have been in place 13 years ago, he would be a free man and still be with us today,” Ben Coones told Kansas legislators in March. Now, his family is fighting to regulate jailhouse witness testimony. “In our case, (the jailhouse witness’) words left us with a history of pain and suffering that can no longer be mended,” Coones’ son, Ben, told Kansas lawmakers in March.Ĭoones spent 12 years behind bars before he was exonerated. The father of five even had an alibi, but Wyandotte County prosecutors relied on a jailhouse witness, who had been convicted of “crimes of dishonesty" and who was later determined to be “unreliable.” No physical evidence tied Coones, whose story was featured Friday on " Dateline," to the crime. When Olin “Pete” Coones went to prison for a murder he did not commit in Kansas City, Kansas, a jailhouse informant was the damning witness. ![]()
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