Snitching

Criminal Informant Law, Policy, and Research

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Orange County violated the Constitution with its secret informant program

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The U.S. Department of Justice has released the results of its six-year investigation into Orange County, California, confirming that the Sheriff’s Department and the Office of the District Attorney routinely violated the Sixth Amendment and the Due Process rights of people in the county jail through law enforcement creation, reward, and use of informants. Story from The Appeal here: DOJ Finds Orange County Sheriff, DA Violated Civil Rights Using Illegal Jailhouse Informants. And on what kinds of enforcement actions might follow, see this from the Orange County Register which documented the scandal for years: Courts likely will be needed to force OC to fix illegal use of jailhouse informants.

The Orange County snitch scandal has provided the public with a rare window into the workings of the informant market. Orange County officials rewarded gang informants with money and other benefits, in exchange for which those informants unconstitutionally gathered information about other defendants. County officials lied for years about the program to defense attorneys and in court. Numerous convictions have been overturned as a result. For more, see these prior posts.

DOJ to investigate Orange County

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The U.S. Department of Justice has announced an investigation–in conjunction with the U.S. Attorney’s Office of the Central District of California–into unconstitutional informant practices in Orange County.  This is a welcome and important development.  Below are links to stories, and to the original letter from former California Attorney General John Van de Kamp and U.C. Irvine Dean Erwin Chemerinsky, requesting that DOJ intervene:

Orange County prosecutors in scandal seeking judgeships

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The Marshall Project is reporting that two prosecutors directly implicated in Orange County’s jailhouse snitch scandal are running for judicial office.  From the story, ‘The Scandal-Singed DAs Who Wants to be Judges‘:

   For the past year, the district attorney’s office in Orange County, Calif., has been battling the fallout from revelations of a decades-old scheme of planting secret informants near defendants’ jail cells…Now two longtime prosecutors from that same office — Michael Murray and Larry Yellin — are running for Superior Court judgeships, aiming to take the bench alongside judges who have called them out for misconduct. Neither prosecutor has been formally sanctioned in the scandal. But both are supervisory-level district attorneys in an office that a judge recently ruled “habitually ignored the law over an extended period of time.” Both, by their own admission, have withheld evidence. And both are considered shoo-ins by the local press. 

Call for federal investigation of Orange County

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The jailhouse snitch scandal in Orange County continues to escalate.  In November, Dean Erwin Chemerinsky, former California Attorney General John Van de Kamp, and numerous other legal experts (including me), called for a federal investigation.  Here is the letter to U.S. Attorney General Lynch.  A month earlier, the New York Times Editorial Board identified the “blatant and systemic misconduct in the Orange County District Attorney’s Office” and also called for a federal investigation.  Meanwhile, the OC Register published this special report entitled “How jailhouse informants and the ‘snitch tank’ put Orange County justice system in turmoil.”