A California lawyer who built her career exonerating convicted murderers has been accused of exchanging sexual messages with one to secure the freedom of another.
Paige Kaneb of the Northern California Innocence Project (NCIP) won international acclaim for overturning the conviction of Maurice Caldwell, 20 years after he was imprisoned for the 1990 murder of Judy Acosta following a drug deal gone bad.
He began corresponding with Marritte Funches after he admitted to murdering Acosta while he was in prison for another murder.
Funches, now 53, claims Kaneb sent her sexually explicit messages in an attempt to secure her cooperation and has made the messages public to the SF standard after turning on the lawyer and allegedly trying to blackmail her for $2 million.
“You make my heart skip a beat,” Kaneb told her in a text message. ‘You give me butterflies. And somehow you always have.
Paige Kaneb of the Northern California Innocence Project (left) exchanged thousands of messages with convicted murderer Marritte Funches (right)
Funches’ testimony helped secure a new trial for Maurice Caldwell (left), whose murder conviction was overturned in 2010 after three years of work by Kaneb (right).
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 investigated Kaneb’s relationship with Funches in 2016 and defended Caldwell’s lawsuit when she admitted that Funches had shown sexual interest in her.
Funches told the SF Standard that he helped Kaneb find new witnesses for Caldwell’s retrial in 2010, but that he broke off their relationship when she broke her promise not to reveal their names publicly.
But Funches got back in touch in March last year and the pair allegedly exchanged almost 9,000 messages over the course of a year.
In one, Kaneb recalled his first encounter with the killer when he visited his Nevada prison along with NCIP founder Linda Starr.
“I still remember that first visit you were staring at Linda the whole time and I pulled my hair out,” he texted me.
‘I wanted you to look at me; she had never admitted it before.
‘I remember when she left for a few minutes. It was like my chest was going to explode. And we started talking… .”
In another exchange, she apologized for their fight in 2010.
Kaneb, who built his career exonerating convicted murderers, claimed he only began reciprocating Funches’ sexualized messages after Caldwell was released.
In one exchange, the couple reflected on their first meeting in a Nevada prison in 2010.
Funches, still serving a life sentence for another murder, released his trades after Kaneb ignored his alleged $2 million blackmail demand.
NCIP insists Funches’ testimony was incidental to the case they built for Caldwell’s release
‘I’m sorry it all fell apart and had such a negative effect on you. I never wanted that,” she wrote in July of last year.
‘I love you. I always have. I never stopped. “Always will be,” she told him in a text message.
“I love you too,” she wrote in response. ‘Always have always will.’
She also sent him a series of racy selfies, including two of her dressed in a sarong in front of a mirror.
“There’s nothing underneath those last two,” he joked.
“My imagination is going crazy right now,” he texted back.
But their relationship began to deteriorate late last year when Funches began asking him for money and help to get out of prison.
An NCIP spokesperson told Chronic SF that Funches began to blackmail her, demanding 2 million dollars. After taxes. In a trust that belongs to ‘me.’
‘I recorded every phone call, saved every text message. And copies of each video. You can try to clean it. But you will never practice law again. Your career is over,” she wrote in an email.
Funches made good on his threat and published what he said was his correspondence with the SF Standard.
‘She pretended to have a personal interest in me. We began a romantic relationship,’ she told the newspaper. ‘It was the art of seduction at its finest. All to get her to finally help Mr. Caldwell.
Lionel Rubalcava was one of 25 people whose murder convictions have since been overturned thanks to the work of the NCIP, while Kaneb has risen to become the organisation’s legal executive.
A spokesperson for Kaneb said she only began reciprocating sexualized messages from Funches in August 2023, long after Caldwell’s release was secured.
The NCIP, based at Santa Clara University, has launched an investigation into Kaneb, who is now its legal director.
He has helped overturn 25 more murder convictions since Caldwell was freed and insists his exoneration is certain.
“As with any unit of the university, when we receive allegations of inappropriate conduct by an employee, we refer the matter to the university for investigation,” CEO Todd Fries said in a statement.
“We take this information seriously,” a spokeswoman for the San Francisco city attorney said. “And we will study the matter.”
