Snitching

Criminal Informant Law, Policy, and Research

Alexandra Natapoff

The death of teenager LeBron Gaither

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This new episode of Radley Balko’s podcast on The Intercept, Collateral Damage: Blown Cover, takes a hard look at the reckless ways that law enforcement endangers the lives of its most vulnerable informants. The episode is devoted to the heartbreaking story of LeBron Gaither, an 18-year-old informant who was tortured and killed after Kentucky police carelessly revealed his identity. For more information about the lawsuit filed by Gaither’s grandmother, see this post: Police found liable for young informant’s death.

The podcast also features Sarah Stillman, author of the influential New Yorker article “The Throwaways,” in which she exposed the widespread use and abuse of child informants. That article helped inspire a 60 Minutes special episode, “Confidential Informants,” about college students pressured to work as informants. For more stories about the use of young informants, see these posts.

U.S. breaks a high-stakes informant deal

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The Washington Post reports that in exchange for access to El Salvadoran prisons, Secretary of State Marco Rubio agreed to turn over nine MS-13 gang informants to the El Salvadoran government, thereby breaking the U.S. government’s promises to those cooperators. Story here: “Rubio promised to betray U.S. informants to get Trump’s El Salvador prison deal.” The quid pro quo is an unusually public and high-profile example of how the government can and routinely does break its promises to informants, exposing cooperators to deportation, retribution and even death. Recent examples can be found here and here, but the problem is an old and endemic one.

Another notable feature of this particular case is the scrutiny and procedural protections that have kicked in as a result of the Justice Department’s efforts to dismiss the cases against the informants. The presiding judge, Judge Joan Azrack, refused to seal the motion to dismiss charges against Vladimir Antonio Arevalo-Chavez, writing that:

“The public has a right under the First Amendment to know about this motion unless the government has identified an overriding compelling interest that warrants sealing. . . . In this case, the Government appears to be making inconsistent representations and the public has a right to know about this motion before its resolution.”

Most informant deals are less formal and more secretive than this one, and therefore trigger little or no scrutiny when they are breached. Which means we never learn about them at all.

Snitch deals in Kilmar Abrego Garcia case

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Last week, a federal judge refused to detain Kilmar Abrego García, a Maryland resident who was wrongly deported to El Salvador and now faces criminal charges, based on what she deemed to be unreliable testimony from three different government informants. Judge Barbara Holmes described the lead cooperator as “a two-time, previously-deported felon, and acknowledged ringleader of a human smuggling operation, who has now obtained for himself an early release from federal prison and delay of a sixth deportation by providing information to the government.” Court order here. A Washington Post article — Star witness against Kilmar Abrego García was due to be deported. Now he’s being freed — describes the informant as having a long criminal history, including gun violence, in contrast with Abrego Garcia’s lack of any criminal record at all. The other two informants were family members of the main informant; in return for their testimony one is seeking release from custody (on unrelated federal criminal charges), and both are seeking deferred action on their pending deportations.

Many have commented on the counterintuitive fact that the government’s star witness has already been convicted of worse crimes than Abrego Garcia is accused of. But the informant market often flips the conventional rules of crime and punishment: letting the government use the proverbial “big fish” as an informant to catch smaller, less culpable fish. The practice is prevalent in, although not limited to, drug enforcement. This New York narcotics unit, for example, helped their informant drug dealers stay in business in exchange for turning in their low-level client drug users. An ACLU report described the same dynamic in New Jersey, under which “more culpable leaders of drug networks — the ‘kingpins’ — may get less severe punishment than underlings who play a lesser role in the drug trafficking operation.”

Perhaps the highest profile critique of this practice issued in 1966 from none other than U.S. Supreme Court Chief Justice Earl Warren, himself a former prosecutor. In its efforts to prosecute Teamsters Union President Jimmy Hoffa for a misdemeanor, the FBI dug up an incarcerated informant who was facing charges on manslaughter, kidnapping, embezzlement, assault and perjury. The informant was freed and all charges eventually dropped in exchange for his help prosecuting Hoffa. The Supreme Court validated the deal in the case Hoffa v. United States, but Chief Justice Warren dissented, complaining that “the Government reache[d] into the jailhouse to employ a man who was himself facing indictments far more serious … than the one confronting the man against whom he offered to inform.” He worried that “this type of informer … evidence[s] a serious potential for undermining the integrity of the truth-finding process in the federal courts.” Chief Justice Warren lost that argument, which is why the government is legally permitted to use, reward, and even forgive serious criminal offenders when they serve as informants against less blameworthy or dangerous people.

U.S. seeks to deport gang informant back to El Salvador

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Brought to the U.S. by the FBI as a material witness in 2023, an informant against the MS-13 gang is now facing deportation back to El Salvador. Federal officials revealed his identity during the case in which he was supposed to testify, which means that he will be identified as a snitch if he is forced to return. He is currently seeking asylum, arguing that deportation would amount to a death sentence. WBUR, an NPR public radio station, reported on the story here: U.S. wants to deport FBI informant who was set to testify in gang case in Mass.

Informants are especially vulnerable in the immigration space. For another example of an El Salvadoran informant, this one a mere teenager, who was deported notwithstanding his cooperation, see this previous post: ICE marks 17-year-old informant for deportation and death.

Using children as informants

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More civil cases in which families have sued police for harm to their children who were working as informants. The cases are collected in this blog post from Professor Jeff Welty, Professor of Public Law & Government at the University of North Carolina; the post also includes several North Carolina police department policies on using children as informants. For more on the topic, see these previous posts.