Snitching

Criminal Informant Law, Policy, and Research

Alexandra Natapoff

Deep dive into informant practices in Cincinnati

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According to a recently released year-long investigation by the Cincinnati Enquirer, local police and prosecutors quietly used informants in dozens of homicide cases, many of which later fell apart. See Enquirer investigation: Cincinnati homicide cases unravel after deals with informants. Here’s just one example from the article:

Before his violent death in 2012 – prosecutors say he was shot for “being a snitch” – [Quincy] Jones became a prolific police informant, joining a network of informants and cooperating witnesses who for years helped Cincinnati law enforcement close homicide cases. The informants sometimes testified in multiple cases and, like Jones, worked with detectives and prosecutors who vouched for their reliability. But an Enquirer investigation found several of those cases later unraveled, raising the possibility that unreliable informants helped send innocent people to prison and allowed others to get away with murder.

Jones began cooperating in 2008 when he was charged with multiple murders. He fled to Seattle; when he was brought back to Cincinnati he met with Police Detective John Horn and offered to cooperate. As the article describes it, “On the day Jones signed the deal, prosecutors dropped one of the murder charges against him and reduced the other to involuntary manslaughter. [] Judge Beth Myers then sentenced him to four years in prison, far less than the 20 years to life he would have faced with a murder conviction.” Two years later Jones cut another deal which permitted him to walk free in 2010.

The article also reveals the kinds of sleight-of-hand used to conceal informant deals from defendants, courts, and the public:

Because [Jones’s] deal was confidential, defense attorneys, judges and juries in future cases wouldn’t know its terms. They also wouldn’t know that if Jones went back on the deal, all the original charges, including a possible life sentence, could be reinstated. Of the 12 homicide cases Jones cooperated on, The Enquirer found, he testified in court about at least five. Each time, Jones said he’d been promised nothing in exchange for his testimony. 

According to his written plea deal, that was true. Because the agreement didn’t identify specific cases, Jones could say his testimony in those cases wasn’t connected to his plea deal. 

[Detective] Horn, who is now retired, said that’s a common arrangement. “You haven’t done anything for me until, you know, you do something for me,” Horn said. “There’s never been any promises made.” 

Paying jailhouse snitches with conjugal visits

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A Miami prosecutor has resigned from a death penalty case after Judge Andrea Ricker Wolfson found evidence of various types of “witness testimony manipulation” and “severe recklessness” by prosecutors stretching back decades. AP story here: Veteran Miami prosecutor quits after judge’s rebuke over conjugal visits for jailhouse informants, and ABA Journal story here.

As I have written many times, there are almost no limits on the kinds of rewards that the government can offer an informant in exchange for information. Typically it is the failure to disclose the benefits, not the propriety of offering the benefits themselves, that constitutes prosecutorial misconduct.

Uncertainty and risk in the informant market

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This article from the New Yorker captures the desperation and broken promises that so often go with being an informant, and how informants are so heavily dependent on their handlers for protection and reward. The article is entitled “What do we owe a prison informant?” It chronicles the dangerous work performed by an informant referred to as “Cyrus” trying to work off part of his prison sentence, and how, notwithstanding the high value of his cooperation, he was never rewarded as promised. From the article:

Although [DEA Agent] J.J. didn’t make any specific offers of a shorter sentence, his relationship with Cyrus was predicated on assurances that Cyrus would benefit from helping the D.E.A. But J.J. had little control over what happened to him—Cyrus’s fate was in the hands of Georgia’s State Board of Pardons and Paroles, which is not beholden to anyone, and certainly not to the D.E.A. The way Cyrus and his family see it, Cyrus risked his life for years with an understanding that he would get leniency in return. And then, he says, he was abandoned.

Another jailhouse snitch ring in Texas

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This deep and detailed series of articles from The Intercept uncovers a prosecutor’s heavy reliance on a snitch ring in the federal prison in Beaumont, Texas, and the discredited convictions that it produced. In the capital murder case against Ronald Prible, for example, a federal judge found that the prosecutor, Kelly Siegler, suppressed exculpatory evidence about the jailhouse informant whose testimony led to Prible’s conviction. Siegler is the television star of the true crime show “Cold Justice.” All three Intercept articles here: The Prosecutor and the Snitch Ring.

The Beaumont prison snitch ring has been in the news before. Ten years ago, Ann Colomb and her four sons were wrongfully convicted of federal drug charges based on dozens of lying Beaumont informants (here’s the original story from Radley Balko in Reason Magazine). Federal Judge Tucker Melancon who presided over the Colomb case complained specifically about Federal Rule 35 which permits federal prisoners to get sentence reductions in exchange for information. (This is the same rule that Siegler used in the Prible case to incentivize her informant, Michael Beckcom, to testify.) As Judge Melancon put it, “Everyone in the federal prisons knows what’s going on . . . . [T]hey realize they can tell the government things that happened years ago—true or not—and get time off their sentences.” And he warned that “[w]e potentially have a huge problem with this network in the federal prison system.”

Orange County snitch scandal still isn’t over

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It began back in 2012, when public defender Scott Sanders started uncovering unconstitutional informant use in the Orange County jail and widespread law enforcement practices designed to cover them up. Dozens of cases were compromised, including homicide cases, due to prosecutorial misconduct. The US Department of Justice conducted a six-year investigation. Now Sanders has filed a new motion detailing many more cases that may have been compromised. From the LAist:

“On top of the cases already impacted by the snitch scandal’s long reach, Sanders outlined dozens more cases in a recent court filing that could be revisited because of new evidence of potential misconduct. That misconduct, Sanders alleges, was carried out by O.C. law enforcement officers and a former top prosecutor who is now a superior court judge.”

For years, Sanders and the Orange County Public Defender office have been the prime drivers for uncovering informant misuse and official nondisclosure. As Maurice Possley of the National Registry of Exonerations points out, “we don’t really know how common it is for law enforcement officials and prosecutors to withhold evidence because it’s a ‘”‘hidden crime.'”