Enquirer: Cincinnati homicide cases unravel after deals with informants

The Cincinnati Enquirer featured a story on police and prosecutors’ use of informants who traded their testimony for deals that reduced their sentences. Later, several homicide cases involving the/those informants fell apart.

Qunicy Jones, arrested on homicide charges in 2008, had been connected to a violent Cincinnati gang for many years, with a criminal record that included robbery, assault, and drug charges. After telling police and prosecutors that he knew details about at least a dozen homicides and could help put suspects behind bars, Jones became a prison informant.

He, like other informants, sometimes testified in multiple cases and worked with law enforcement officials who vouched for their reliability.

But a Cincinnati Enquirer investigation found several of those cases later unraveled, raising the possibility that unreliable informants may have helped send innocent people to prison and allowed guilty persons to go unpunished. The Enquirer’s investigation found one informant claimed to have heard a fellow inmate’s murder confession while eavesdropping on him through air vents at the Justice Center. This would later prove to be physically challenging, due to the locations of the cells of the inmates in question.

Another informant’s fingerprint was found at the scene of a homicide that he blamed on someone else. And another claimed he witness a fatal shooting that occurred while he was locked up in prison, many miles away.

“It’s so unlikely that they were actually hearing so many confessions or incriminatory statements,” said Donald Caster in the March 21, 2023 Cincinnati Enquirer article. Caster is a UC Law professor and an attorney with the Ohio Innocence Project who represents a man accused by one of the informants. “It just casts even more doubt on their veracity.” Caster’s area of expertise is criminal defense and appellate litigation. He has a strong interest in the civil rights arena.

Read the full story and see how the use of an informant impacted the case of OIP exoneree Marcus Sapp, who served 13 years in prison after being wrongfully convicted of murder and assault. Sapp was released in January 2023, pending his new trial.

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