Snitching

Criminal Informant Law, Policy, and Research

Alexandra Natapoff

Orange County jailhouse snitch operation

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The District Attorney’s Office in Orange County is accused of running an unconstitutional jailhouse snitch program, much like the infamous one in Los Angeles that ended twenty years ago. See these stories from the L.A. Times , the Voice of OC, and and Orange County Register. From the Register:

[Defense attorneys] say sheriff’s deputies, including one who worked as a “handler” for jailed informants, arranged for informants to be placed next to selected inmates and lure them into making incriminating statements. Deputies and prosecutors then conspired to hide the fact the men were informants from defense attorneys and pretended their encounters were coincidental, despite the longstanding legal requirement that prosecutors turn over information that could help the defense.

Exoneration in Wisconsin

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The Wisconsin Center for Investigative Journalism just published this story–When lies lead to wrongful convictions–about Sammy Hadaway, a psychologically damaged defendant who was pressured during a police interrogation into wrongfully confessing and incriminating his friend Chaunte Ott. Ott was later exonerated of the wrongful rape and murder charges after serving 12 years. From the story:

Four years after Ott was convicted, attorneys at the Wisconsin Innocence Project began working on his case. The Innocence Project, a University of Wisconsin Law School program that investigates allegations of wrongful convictions, called for DNA testing of the semen collected from [the victim’s] body. The DNA evidence, which excluded both Ott and Hadaway as possible contributors, matched a convicted serial killer named Walter Ellis who strangled and killed at least seven women between 1986 and 2007.

Snitching among slaves

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Professor Andrea Dennis has posted this exploration of the role of Black informants during slavery: A Snitch in Time: An Historical Sketch of Black Informing During Slavery. It’s her second piece on informants–the first one addressed juvenile snitching in the war on drugs. Here’s the abstract:

This article sketches the socio-legal creation, use, and regulation of informants in the Black community during slavery and the Black community’s response at that time. Despite potentially creating benefits such as crime control and sentence reduction, some Blacks today are convinced that cooperation with government investigations and prosecutions should be avoided. One factor contributing to this perspective is America’s reliance on Black informants to police and socially control Blacks during slavery, the Civil Rights Movement, and the Wars on Drugs, Crime and Gangs. Notwithstanding this historical justification for non-cooperation, only a few informant law and policy scholars have examined closely the Black community’s relationship with informing. Furthermore, even among this small group of works, noticeably absent are historical explorations of Black America’s experience with informing during slavery. Drawn using a variety of primary and secondary historical and legal sources, this article develops a snapshot of the past revealing many similarities between the Black experience with informing both while enslaved and in contemporary times. Consideration of these resemblances during present debate on the topic may help to facilitate nuanced conversation as to whether and how the modern Black community and government should approach using informants in current times.

This is an important piece of history. As Dennis points out, there has been an underappreciated trajectory from slave informants to the FBI snitches planted in civil rights organizations, to the “Stop Snitching” movement in urban neighborhoods. For a helpful articulation of the relationship between that trajectory and hip hop’s glorification of “stop snitching,” see Professor Mark Lamont Hill’s piece “A Breakdown of the Stop Snitching Movement.”

Lowell, Mass. police sued for informant misuse

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The city of Lowell, MA, is being sued, along with Officer Thomas Lafferty, for permitting the longterm misuse of informants who allegedly planted drugs on innocent people. Stories from the Boston Globe and the Lowell Sun here, here and here. Lowell has been under scrutiny for its informant policies: earlier this year a prosecutorial review cleared Officer Lafferty of wrongdoing in connection with his informant practices.

Plaintiffs harmed by informants often have a difficult time holding government actors and agencies responsible in court, since it can be hard to show that the government authorized the informants’ bad behavior. For a prominent counter-example, see Estate of Davis v. U.S., 340 F.Supp.2d 79 (D. Mass. 2004) (describing a variety of legal theories under which the FBI might be held liable for murders committed by their informants Whitey Bulger and Stephen Flemmi). With growing scrutiny of and information about the government-informant relationship, the law in this regard may be due for a change.