Snitching

Criminal Informant Law, Policy, and Research

Alexandra Natapoff

DOJ audit of DEA confidential source program

by

The U.S. Department of Justice Office of the Inspector General has just released this audit of the DEA’s Confidential Source Program.  In a rare glimpse into the scope and scale of informant deployment, the audit states: “Between October 1, 2010, and September 30, 2015, the DEA had over 18,000 active confidential sources assigned to its domestic offices, with over 9,000 of those sources receiving approximately $237 million in payments.”

The audit was critical of the DEA. Here are a few excerpts:

  • “[W]hile DEA policy prohibits paying deactivated sources who were deactivated because of an arrest warrant or for committing a serious offense, we found two concerning instances of payments to previously-deactivated sources. In one case, the DEA reactivated a confidential source who previously provided false testimony in trials and depositions. During the approximate 5-year period of reactivation, this source was used by 13 DEA field offices and paid $469,158. More than $61,000 of the $469,158 was paid after this source was once again deactivated for making false statements to a prosecutor. . . .  [W]e estimated the DEA may have paid about $9.4 million to more than 800 deactivated sources between fiscal years (FY) 2011 and 2015.”

  • “[W]e were extremely concerned to discover the DEA condoned its confidential sources’ use of “sub-sources,” who are individuals a source recruits and pays to perform activities or provide information related to the source’s work for the DEA. During our review of DEA files, we found evidence of sources who were paid based, in part, on the need to pay “sub-sources,” but the information in the files was insufficient to allow us to determine the full extent of such payments.”
  • “[W]hen we asked the DEA Intelligence Division to provide us with an itemized list and overall total of payments to intelligence-related confidential sources, it was unable to do so. We reviewed DEA records and estimated that, during the 5-year period of our review, the Intelligence Division paid more than $30 million to sources who provided narcotics-related intelligence and contributed to law enforcement operations, $25 million of which went to just 9 sources. Additionally, we identified one source who was paid over $30 million during a 30-year period, some of it in cash payments of more than $400,000. We concluded the Intelligence Division’s management and oversight of its sources was not commensurate with the large amount of payments it made to them.”

Threats against cooperators and calls for secrecy

by

Earlier this year, the Federal Judicial Center released a report assessing threats against federal defendants who cooperate: Survey of Harm to Cooperators.  A survey of federal judges, prosecutors, defense counsel, and probation officers showed that the majority of these legal officials were aware of threats to or harms against cooperating defendants in one or more cases.  The survey identified hundreds of cases in which cooperators or witnesses were threatened or harmed.

The Marshall Project reported on this issue today in an article entitled “Is the Internet endangering criminal informants? A judicial committee proposes more secrecy.”  A committee of the Judicial Conference has called for more secrecy regarding cooperator status, including proposals to routinely seal records or create special “sealed supplements” to every case.  But there are several problems with this approach.  As the Marshall Project put it:

“Many defense attorneys and free speech advocates say that the proposed new rules are troublesome (and perhaps unlawful) for at least two reasons. First, they say, creating a sealed annex in every case could deprive the public, and the media, of basic information that goes beyond the issue of cooperation. Second, several defense attorney told me this week the proposed new rules could have the perverse effect of making life even more dangerous for informants; the existence of sealed supplement would mean every inmate was presumed to be a “snitch” unless proven otherwise. And such proof would be hard to come by with the information sealed.” 

Informant expert testimony held admissible in Connecticut

by

The Connecticut Appellate Court has held that expert testimony on the general unreliability of jailhouse informants is admissible, and that a trial court abused its discretion when it excluded a defense expert (me) in a trial in which the conviction depended on several jailhouse informants.  The opinion is here: State v. Leniart.  The discussion of the expert issue is in Part IV, beginning on page 42.

The opinion contains several key findings:

1. The Court “acknowledged the growing recognition by the legal community that jailhouse informant testimony is inherently unreliable and is a major contributor to wrongful convictions throughout this country.” (p. 43, quoting State v. Arroyo)

2. “Although credibility determinations ultimately must be left to the jury, expert testimony nevertheless is admissible if it can provide a jury with generalized information or behavioral observations that are outside the knowledge of an average juror and that would assist it in assessing a particular witness’ credibility. As long as the expert does not directly opine about a particular witness’ credibility or [] testify in such a way as to vouch indirectly for or bolster the credibility of a witness, the expert’s testimony would not invade the province of the jury to decide credibility and may be admitted.” (p.49)

3. An understanding of jailhouse informant culture, including the expectation of benefits and the lengths to which informants may go to procure and fabricate evidence, is not within the ken and understanding of the average juror (p. 50).

4. Expert informant testimony is similar to expert testimony regarding the unreliability of eyewitness testimony which is now widely viewed as admissible (p.51-52).

5. Generalized jury instructions may be insufficient to educate jurors regarding the dangers of informant unreliability,  since in eyewitness cases “generalized jury instructions were not an adequate substitute for expert testimony” (p. 52).

Interview with Rachel Hoffman’s mother Margie Weiss

by

Rachel Hoffman was a young informant who was killed in 2008.  Her parents’ activism and lobbying led to the passage of Rachel’s Law in Florida, which created new, more thoughtful police guidelines for handling informants.  Rachel’s mother, Margie Weiss, has remained a vocal activist and educator on the issue of informant reform. As she put it, “[s]cared kids get talked into assisting the police department or some law enforcement agency for some smaller crime, and then gets sent into a much larger, much more dangerous situation. Initially my daughter was arrested for having less than an ounce of pot…and she received a death sentence.” Here is the interview with her: How One Mother Turned Tragedy Into Triumph: The Rachel Morningstar Hoffman Story. 

Orange County prosecutors in scandal seeking judgeships

by

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.