The Importance of Cigarette Receipts in a Thirty-Two-Year-Old Murder Case

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.

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.