Talk:Jailhouse confession

Copied from other articles

Some of the content for creating this article appears to have been copied from Informant §Jailhouse informants, probably this version. The material was apparently removed from the False confession article, but I cannot find where or when that happened. I have added the Copied template to attribute this content to its sources. - Cameron Dewe (talk) 23:30, 22 July 2022 (UTC)

Lead section has extra information

The INTRODUCTORY paragraph(s) should provide an overview of an article and be able to stand alone as a summary that sets out the topic's most important and notable aspects. The LEAD section of the current version of this article has become cluttered and can probably be pared back to just the first sentence. All the other content after the first sentence can then be moved into separate SECTIONS under various different HEADINGS that deal with different aspects of the subject. While this might make the lead a bit short, it will provide more room to summarize the key issues with jailhouse confessions, without having to cope with all the fine details. Also, shorter articles only need a short lead section, which should be limited to just one or two paragraphs if there are less than 15,000 characters of readable prose; i.e. informative article text, excluding supporting images, info boxes, tables, notes, references, external links, etc. - Cameron Dewe (talk) 00:03, 23 July 2022 (UTC)

The extra information that was in the lead section has now been moved into the body of the article. So I have removed the tag. - Cameron Dewe (talk) 12:22, 23 July 2022 (UTC)

Globalize

This article needs to consider the global perspectives of a jailhouse confession and its admissibility as evidence in court. Other countries that have their legal systems based on English common law, such as Australia, Canada, New Zealand, and England and Wales in the United Kingdom have adopted various different legal principles concerning the admissibility of evidence from informants imprisoned with defendants that differ from the United States. - Cameron Dewe (talk) 02:53, 23 July 2022 (UTC)

Avoid: It has been noted ...

In the edit summary of this edit, editor BD2412 questions why I tagged the phrase "It has been noted ..." with a "By whom?" clean-up tag, asking: "why would you put a "by whom" tag in front of a cited quote?" The simple answer is that I want to know who made this statement and in what context. At the time I read this sentence in the article I failed to recognize that the claim being made was even a quotation. If I made that mistake, other readers could too. By introducing this quote with the words "It has been noted ..." one is EDITORIALIZING by presenting an opinion as fact. The phrase "It should be noted ..." and variants have a whole essay devoted to avoiding use of this phrase. Merely providing a citation does not tell me who said it, only that I need to read the source to verify what was said. If one is going to include quotations in the text, perhaps because they make a point better than any one else can, then these need to be attributed to the person who said them, not just cited. And while on the topic of citations, perhaps it would be a good idea to provide the full citation and where it can be found online, along with the full quotation, not just some fragments, that Jana Winograde made at the start of the abstract to her 1990 article in the California Law Review.

Winograde, Jana (May 1990). "Jailhouse Informants and the Need for Judicial Use Immunity in Habeas Corpus Proceedings". California Law Review. 78 (3): 755–785. doi:10.2307/3480844. ISSN 0008-1221. Retrieved 23 July 2022. Jailhouse informants who recount their fellow prisoners' "confessions" are often used by the state as witnesses in criminal prosecutions. It has recently become public knowledge that such confessions are easily fabricated. However, many defendants convicted on the basis of allegedly perjured jailhouse confessions remain imprisoned because they lack the mechanism necessary to compel the informant to recant his earlier testimony in habeas corpus proceedings based on false evidence introduced at trial.

This is why I tagged the phrase. Removing the tag does not remove this editorial defect in the article. It still needs to be fixed. Also, it may be better if Winograde's opinions were expanded to explain that jailhouse informants would face a perjury charge if they recanted on their testimony, so have an incentive not to recant even if fabricated, while defendants are often unable to challenge or disprove such testimony. - Cameron Dewe (talk) 06:20, 23 July 2022 (UTC)

"It should be noted" is a statement of opinion on the value of the thing to be noted. "It has been noted" is a statement of fact about what is presented in a source. WP:NOTED is very careful to avoid implying that it is problematic to say "it has been noted" followed by a source wherein the thing has in fact been noted. There is no editorial defect to fix. We are not going to start tangling sentences up in knots or introducing excessive detail to prevent the rare instance of a reader not noticing quotation marks. If the reader lacks facility with the English language to that degree, they should be reading Simple Wikipedia. BD2412 T 06:27, 23 July 2022 (UTC)

Winograde's quote was made in the context of the California justice system, not all of the United States, and it is her opinion, so should be attributed to her. If you are going to quote her then attribute the quote to her, not some anonymous "It". I have rewritten the first couple of sentences to provide the full quotation of what she said and found the full citation online too. - Cameron Dewe (talk) 07:08, 23 July 2022 (UTC)

This is not how we write encyclopedia articles. Look at this line from George Washington's teeth:

In 1756, when Washington was 24 years old, a dentist pulled his first tooth.

Not:

According to Jed Kirshman of the The Baltimore Sun, in 1756, when Washington was 24 years old, a dentist pulled his first tooth.

There are billions of facts in the encyclopdia, and every recitation of a fact with a source indicates that the source has noted the fact. It would be absurd if the encyclopedia was written the way you propose. BD2412 T 19:07, 23 July 2022 (UTC)

References