The prospect of sentence reduction is so coercive in eliciting false testimony from inmates and so corrupting to the notion of a fair trial that the 10th Circuit Court held in the summer of 1998, in the case of U.S. v. Singleton , that such testimony is unreliable and impedes a defendant's right to due process of law. Federal prosecutors were so opposed to any limitation on their ability to trade sentence reduction for incriminating testimony that they chose to challenge the 10th Circuit ruling and several bills to overturn the ruling were filed in Congress. Under this pressure, the 10th Circuit ruling was reversed early this year. Often these inmates testify against people they have never met. They corroborate crimes they've never witnessed.
Prosecutors win cases.
Convicts win early freedom. The accused loses. Federal agents have been accused of helping move the schemes along by providing convicts some of the information. For years, inmates have warned federal authorities about the practice. But it has made it nearly impossible to punish them when they abuse that right.