Snitching

Criminal Informant Law, Policy, and Research

Blog

Illinois legislature passes new informant reform

by

By Michelle Feldman

In April, the Illinois legislature passed new legislation that would require pre-trial reliability hearings and specific disclosure requirements before jailhouse informant testimony is admissible in the most serious criminal cases. Now Senate Bill 1830 is awaiting action by the governor.

Illinois has been on the forefront of safeguarding against wrongful convictions stemming from unreliable jailhouse informant testimony. Based on recommendations from former Illinois Governor George Ryan’s Commission on Capital Punishment, the state passed a law in 2003 requiring pre-trial reliability hearings and specific disclosure requirements before jailhouse informant testimony was admissible in capital cases, which became moot when the death penalty was abolished in Illinois in 2011. SB 1830 would apply the same safeguards in murder, sexual assault and arson cases. Read more here from NPR.

Nebraska considered jailhouse informant reform

by

Earlier this year, Nebraska introduced legislation that would have enhanced protections against unreliable jailhouse informants, including reliability hearings, enhanced disclosure requirements, and mechanisms to keep track of the government’s use of such informants.  The text of the bill (which is currently on hold) is here; story in the Lincoln Journal Star is here. 

The developing science of informant cognition

by

Behavioral psychologists have been studying the informant phenomenon, especially the thorny question of why jurors believe unreliable informants even when they know that the informants have strong incentives to fabricate evidence.  Some of those studies can be found here in the Resources & Scholarship section.

A group of researchers recently published this study finding that information from an informant can affect other witnesses in a case. Specifically, the study found that eyewitnesses who identified suspects in a line-up actually changed their identifications after learning that a jailhouse informant had implicated a different suspect.  Here is the abstract:

“Prior research has shown that primary confession evidence can alter eyewitnesses’ identifications and self-reported confidence. The present study investigated whether secondary confession evidence from a jailhouse informant could have the same effect. Participants (N = 368) watched a video of an armed robbery and made an identification decision from a photo lineup. Except for those in the no-feedback conditions, all participants then read that certain lineup members either confessed to the crime, denied involvement, or were implicated by a jailhouse informant. Jailhouse informant testimony implicating the identified lineup member led participants to have significantly higher confidence in their identification. In contrast, jailhouse informant testimony that implicated a lineup member other than the identified led participants to have significantly lower confidence in their initial identification, and 80% of these witnesses changed their identification. These results indicate that jailhouse informant testimony can influence eyewitnesses’ confidence and their identification decisions.”

Preston M. Mote & Jeffrey S. Neuschatz & Brian H. Bornstein & Stacy A. Wetmore & Kylie N. Key, Secondary Confessions as Post-identification Feedback: How Jailhouse Informant Testimony Can Alter Eyewitnesses’ Identification Decisions, Journal of Police and Criminal Psychology (2018).

We already know that informant testimony can arise to bolster weak cases, providing corroboration for faulty forensic evidence or uncertain eyewitness identifications.  This new study suggests that in addition to bolstering, informant testimony can actually alter other witnesses’ testimony.