Jacksonville Criminal Lawyer Blog
In Jacksonville, Florida when a person is arrested for a crime and taken to jail, he/she will have an opportunity to make a phone call from the Duval County Jail. However, every inmate in the Duval County Jail (as well as other jails and prisons) and everyone having a conversation with an inmate in jail need to be aware that the conversation will almost certainly be recorded and anything said during that phone call can be used against a criminal defendant in court.
This may seem obvious, but not everyone is aware of the fact that inmate calls from jail can be used as evidence in a criminal trial and/or sentencing hearing. For example, a guy who was convicted of a federal crime in Georgia actually used the phone in federal prison to try and commit mortgage fraud, according to an article on ajc.com. The federal inmate’s conversations from prison in which he tried to lure victims into a mortgage fraud scheme were recorded and used in federal criminal court to convict him of mortgage fraud and add a consecutive 10 years to his existing 20 year prison sentence. This is an extreme example of an inmate providing incriminating evidence to the government by way of a jail call, but the better general practice is to refrain from talking about your case over the phone in jail or prison.