A California lawyer who built her career exonerating convicted murderers has been accused of exchanging sexts with one to secure the freedom of another.
Paige Kaneb of the Northern California Innocence Project (NCIP) won international plaudits for overturning the conviction of Maurice Caldwell, 20 years after he was jailed for the 1990 murder of Judy Acosta after a drug deal that went wrong.
She began corresponding with Marritte Funches after he admitted to Acosta’s killing while in prison for a separate murder.
Funches, now 53, claims that Kaneb sent him sexually explicit messages in a bid to secure his co-operation and has released the messages to the SF Standard after turning on the lawyer and allegedly attempting to blackmail her for $2 million.
‘You make my heart jump,’ Kaneb told him in one text. ‘You give me butterflies. And somehow you always have.’
When Caldwell’s conviction was overturned in 2021, he won an $8 million settlement from San Francisco, one of the largest in the city’s history, for fabrication of evidence.
The City Attorney probed Kaneb’s relationship with Funches in 2016 as defended Caldwell’s suit when she admitted that Funches had shown a sexual interest in her.
Funches told the SF Standard that he helped Kaneb find new witnesses for Caldwell’s 2010 retrial, but that he broke off their relationship when she broke a promise not to reveal their names publicly.
But Funches got back in touch in March last year and the pair allegedly exchanged nearly 9,000 messages over the course of a year.
In one Kaneb recalled her first meeting with the killer when she visited his Nevada jail alongside NCIP founder Linda Starr.
‘I still remember in that first visit you were looking at Linda the whole time and I took my hair out,’ she texted.
‘I wanted you to look at me — I’ve never admitted that before.
‘I remember when she left for a few minutes. It was like my chest would explode. And we began talking…. ❤.’
In another exchange she apologized for their falling out back in 2010.
‘I’m sorry things fell apart and that it had such a negative effect on you. I never wanted that,’ she wrote in July last year.
‘I love you. I always have. Never stopped. Always will,’ he told her in one text.
‘I love you too,’ she wrote in response. ‘Always have, always will.’
She also sent him a series of risque selfies including two of her dressed in a sarong in front of a mirror.
‘Nothing underneath in those last two,’ she teased.
‘My imagination is going crazy right now,’ he texted back.
But their relationship began to deteriorate towards the end of last year when Funches began asking for money and for her help in getting out of prison.
A spokesman for NCIP told the SF Chronical that Funches began blackmailing her demanding ‘2 million dollars. After taxes. In a trust that belongs to ‘me’.’
‘I recorded every phone call, kept every text. And copies of every video. You can try to clean it up. But you’ll never practice law again. Your career is done,’ he wrote in an email.
Funches made good on his threat and released what he said was their correspondence to the SF Standard.
‘She pretended to take a personal interest in me. We began a romantic relationship,’ he told the paper. ‘It was the art of seduction at its finest. All to get me to finally help Mr. Caldwell.’
A spokesperson for Kaneb said she only began reciprocating Funches’ sexualized messages in August 2023, long after Caldwell’s release had been secured.
NCIP which is based at Santa Clara University has begun an investigation into Kaneb who is now its legal director.
It has helped overturn 25 more murder convictions since Caldwell was freed and insists that his exoneration is safe.
‘As with any unit of the university, when we receive any allegations of inappropriate conduct by an employee, we refer the matter to the university for investigation,’ executive director Todd Fries said in a statement.
‘We take this information seriously,’ a spokeswoman for San Francisco’s city attorney said. ‘And will be looking into the matter.’