“Informant Industrial Complex” On Trial

By NORA GRACE-FLOOD | New Haven Independent

A New Haven-based criminal defense attorney took aim at the so-called ​“jailhouse informant industrial complex” as he sought to convince the state Supreme Court to overturn a Church Street South murder conviction.

Defense attorney Kevin Smith made that argument Thursday morning during oral arguments before a panel of state Supreme Court judges in a courtroom on Capital Avenue in Hartford.

Smith and his colleague Norm Pattis are representing Christopher Calhoun, who was arrested in 2018 and found guilty by a jury in 2020 of the 2011 murder of Isaiah Gantt at the now-demolished Church Street South housing complex. Calhoun is currently serving a 45-year prison sentence for that murder.

At a hearing attended by 10 of Calhoun’s family members and closest friends who had traveled to Hartford on Thursday, Smith took the lead before the Supreme Court judicial panel in arguing Calhoun’s appeal of the murder conviction. 

In particular, Smith — just as Pattis did in legal papers filed in the runup to Thursday’s hearing — argued that the original trial court judge got it wrong when he declined to give special instructions to Calhoun’s jury that two key witnesses were ​“jailhouse informants,” even though they brokered deals with state prosecutors while they were incarcerated to testify against Calhoun in exchange for favorable treatment from the state. 

Senior Assistant State’s Attorney Nancy Chupak, meanwhile, argued before the Supreme Court judges in favor of upholding Calhoun’s conviction. (Read more about the appeal and the underlying legal debate here.)

During his time before the judges on Thursday, Smith criticized the process by which two key witnesses — both of whom were incarcerated on unrelated matters at the time — came forward to testify against Calhoun.