Snitching

Criminal Informant Law, Policy, and Research

Alexandra Natapoff

Japan considers snitching

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Japan is introducing American-style plea bargaining in which defendants can trade information about others in exchange for leniency.  Some are concerned about the risks of snitching in general, and of wrongful convictions in particular.  The law is more limited than the U.S. version, and only permits certain kinds of deals and only for certain kinds of crimes.  From the Japan Times:

“Unlike the U.S. plea bargaining system, admitting to a crime does not warrant a deal with prosecutors in Japan. The new system, introduced in a revision to the criminal procedure law, allows suspects in such crimes as bribery, embezzlement, tax fraud and drug smuggling to negotiate with prosecutors. The bargaining only applies to crimes listed in the law, with murder and assault off-limits.”

Bulk arrests and convictions based on unreliable informants

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This story from Tennessee reminded me of the high profile snitch debacle in Hearne, Texas in which a confidential informant working for the local drug task force set up dozens of innocent African Americans.  Similarly, in Tracy City, Tennessee, the city and the police department are being sued by an innocent couple who–along with 29 other people–were set up by an unsupervised drug informant.  Here is an excerpt from the story:

“Tina Prater walked into the police station with a reputation as a drug addict and a con artist. She walked out with a tape recorder, some cash and a mission: help the police chief arrest anyone whose name made it onto their list. Prater, 47, has admitted in a sworn affidavit that she framed people while working as a confidential informant for the Tracy City Police Department in 2017. She recruited imposters to act as other people, recorded audio of purported drug deals and turned the tapes over to Chief Charlie Wilder, who oversees just four officers in one of Tennessee’s poorest and most drug-addicted counties.”

And here is another story just like these two, in which a Florida drug informant admitted that she set up innocent people by fabricating drug deals: she did it in exchange for money, a home, and custody of her children.

Former police chief and prosecutor on the dangers of snitching in USA Today

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Here is an important op-ed in USA Today from Miriam Krinsky and Ronal Serpas: “Stop letting prosecutors get away with threatening murder.” They chronicle the misuse of informants by law enforcment in Orange County and across the country.  About Orange Country, they write:

“Prosecutors used informants to do what would have been illegal for them to do directly — question individuals awaiting trial without their lawyer present and, even worse, use threats of murder and violence to coerce confessions. . . . These practices fly in the face of the fundamental duty of prosecutors: to seek truth and pursue justice.”

Krinsky is a former federal prosecutor and now the Executive Director of Fair and Just Prosecution.  Serpas is former Chief of Police for New Orleans and now Professor of Criminology at Loyola University.

Professor Robert Bloom on jailhouse informant expert testimony

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Professor Robert Bloom is an expert on informants who has testified in numerous cases.  He has now authored this article,What Jurors Should Know about Informants: The Need for Expert Testimony, Mich. St. L. Rev. (forthcoming 2019).  Here is the abstract:  

  With the advent of DNA exonerations, the data would indicate that many individuals have been wrongly convicted. In looking at the causes of the exonerations, nearly 20% have involved testimony by accomplices and jailhouse informants. The questionable credibility of these individuals has long been recognized by courts and legislatures. Reforms in this area include, enhanced jury instructions, pre-trial credibility hearings, and corroboration before the testimony can be introduced.  

  This article argues the efficacy of expert testimony to further assist jurors in measuring the credibility of these witnesses. Although the use of experts has largely been disfavored by courts, there has been a gradual movement to use experts for eyewitness identifications, the major cause of exonerations. The article proposes a similar movement for informant testimony.

Professor Bloom is also the author of the book Ratting: The Use and Abuse of Informants in the American Justice System (2002).