Snitching

Criminal Informant Law, Policy, and Research

Alexandra Natapoff

Law review article on Rachel’s Law

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The Boston College Journal of Law & Social Justice has published this note, Toward Efficiency and Equity in Law Enforcement: “Rachel’s Law” and the Protection of Drug Informants. It focuses on an important provision in Rachel’s Law that was eliminated, that would have required police to provide potential informants with counsel. Here’s the abstract:

Following the murder of Rachel Morningstar Hoffman–a 23-year old college graduate–Florida passed “Rachel’s Law,” which established new guidelines for the police when dealing with confidential informants. Immediately prior to its enactment, lawmakers stripped Rachel’s Law of key provisions. These provisions required police to provide a potential informant with an attorney before agreeing to any deal. Opponents of these provisions argue that they hamstring law enforcement agencies in their efforts to prosecute drug crimes. Rather than serving as an obstacle to effective law enforcement, the attorney provision in the original version of Rachel’s Law enables efficient prosecution of crimes and protects minor drug offenders who may be unsuited for potentially dangerous undercover informant work. This Note recommends that the attorney provision be restored to Rachel’s Law, and encourages other states to enact similar statutes.

In the news: Seattle ATF informant with history of crime against women

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A story by the Seattle Times about an ATF informant with a disturbing history of violence against women: Violent criminal on federal payroll as informant. The story begins like this:

Despite a history of abusing women and violent behavior in prison, Joshua Allan Jackson managed to become a federal informant, trigger a citywide Seattle police alert and hold a 18-year-old woman as his sexual prisoner.

Impact of “Rachel’s Law” on informant use

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The Tallahassee Democrat has published this article about the effects of Rachel’s Law on informant use in Florida, four years after the death of Rachel Hoffman: Four years later, Hoffman’s death still impacts CI use. The article concludes that the Tallahassee police department made some significant changes.

For six months immediately following Hoffman’s death, the department suspended the use of all CIs. For a long time, no one wanted to work narcotics cases, which often rely on informants, the chief said.

“We had to be confident in our investigators that they were ready,” Chief Jones said.

An audit of department confidential-informant files conducted about six months after Hoffman was killed found lax record keeping and noted areas of improvement. Personnel were moved, the vice unit was made a part the Criminal Investigations Division of a new Special Investigation Section and supervision was stepped up.

Today, TPD’s rules governing the handling of confidential informants mirror that of Rachel’s Law, which was spearheaded by Hoffman’s parents and provides some safeguards for vulnerable informants.

“I think we’ve got a very good policy now,” Jones said. “We have elevated ourselves and are back in the lead and set the tone for the state.”

Tallahassee is reminiscent of Los Angeles in the 1990s. After a massive grand jury investigation concluded that the jail was rampant with unreliable informants and that police and prosecutors were relying on them, the Los Angeles District Attorney’s Office instituted significant changes. Today, it has some of the most rigorous regulations for the tracking and use of jailhouse informants in the country: Los Angeles County District Attorney’s Office Legal Policies Manual.

Miami New Times series on juvenile informant

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Enriquez Bosco was 15 years old when he became an informant for the police, providing information against one of Miami’s most notorious gangs. This three-part series in the Miami New Times documents Bosco’s travails–including drug addition, rape, and ultimately deportation–from which his handlers failed to protect him and in some cases, may have brought on. From Part 2 of the story:

Enriquez’s story begins and ends in Nicaragua, where he was exiled this past June. Though he had cooperated with Miami police to bust as many as 30 gang members — including leaders of the infamous International Posse — authorities allowed him to be beaten, raped, and exiled to the country of his birth with barely a mention of his service. His crime: a guilty plea to possessing traces of cocaine, a third-degree felony that required two days in jail. It resulted from a long-ago drug habit that started when police employed him to make a drug buy.

Juvenile informants often incur terrible risks with little or no protection from the legal system. For an indepth look at the phenomenon, see Andrea Dennis, “Collateral Damage? Juvenile Snitches in America’s Wars on Drugs, Crime and Gangs,” 46 Am. Crim. L. Rev. 1145 (2009).

The way it’s supposed to work: organizational informants

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The strongest arguments for informant use are connected to the nature of criminal organizations: informants permit the government to get information about, infiltrate, and destabilize group criminal activity. The most famously effective such deployment was the FBI’s use of informants to go after the mafia, a success story that is often invoked in support of informant use more generally. Of course even that success story had its costs: see this post on the dangers of mafia informants.

These tactics are now on display in several recent cases regarding insider trading and computer hacking, in which the use of informants has not only permitted prosecution of individual wrongdoers but may be weakening the culture of collective wrongdoing itself. According to this Reuters report, “[t]he FBI says it has enough informants lined up to keep its investigations of suspected illegal insider trading at hedge funds going for at least five more years.” The New York Times opines that the conversion of a leading hacker into an informant “will sow even more distrust and dissension in the ranks of [the international hacker movement].” In both communities, the knowledge that colleagues and peers may be informants could well chill criminal activity. At the same time, the government should be careful not to send the message that becoming an informant is a get-out-of-jail-free card, a double-message that could undermine deterrence. See this post.