Snitching

Criminal Informant Law, Policy, and Research

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Orange County prosecutors in scandal seeking judgeships

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The Marshall Project is reporting that two prosecutors directly implicated in Orange County’s jailhouse snitch scandal are running for judicial office.  From the story, ‘The Scandal-Singed DAs Who Wants to be Judges‘:

   For the past year, the district attorney’s office in Orange County, Calif., has been battling the fallout from revelations of a decades-old scheme of planting secret informants near defendants’ jail cells…Now two longtime prosecutors from that same office — Michael Murray and Larry Yellin — are running for Superior Court judgeships, aiming to take the bench alongside judges who have called them out for misconduct. Neither prosecutor has been formally sanctioned in the scandal. But both are supervisory-level district attorneys in an office that a judge recently ruled “habitually ignored the law over an extended period of time.” Both, by their own admission, have withheld evidence. And both are considered shoo-ins by the local press. 

Following a terrorism informant in real time

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In this Sundance award-winning documentary, (T)error, filmmakers Lyric Cabral and David Felix Sutcliffe follow a local professional informant as he collects information about his target for his FBI handlers.  The New York Times Magazine, which published “The Informant and the Filmmakers” today, describes the film as follows:

   “By some counts, nearly half of the 500-plus terrorism-related convictions in federal court since the Sept. 11 attacks have involved informants. Before ‘‘(T)error,’’ most of what was known of their work came from indictments and snippets of wiretapped dialogue, served up by prosecutors and neatly presented for the courtroom. Filmed without the F.B.I.’s cooperation and apparently without its knowledge, ‘‘(T)error’’ shows how an informant puts a case together from its raw ingredients.”

The article relies on Trevor Aaronson’s book “The Terror Factory: Inside the FBI’s Manufactured War on Terrorism,” which criticizes the phenomenon of terrorism informants more broadly.   Interested readers should also take a look at Wadie Said’s recent book “Crimes of Terror: The Legal and Political Implications of Federal Terrorism Prosecutions,” which argues that the federal legal system has become distorted in response to terrorism prosecutions in general, and the use of informants in particular.  Click here for links to both books.

Washington Post zeroes in on jailhouse snitches in capital cases

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The Washington Post just ran this story entitled “Va. murder trial may become part of national debate on jail informants.”  The story exposes the use of four questionable jailhouse informants in a Virginia death penalty case, and connects those issues to the Orange County scandal, another high profile informant debacle in Washington D.C., and reform efforts around the county. From the story:

“When a Virginia man faces a possible death sentence in a murder trial later this year, his fate may rest on the testimony of four jailhouse informants, two of whom were initially found mentally incompetent to stand trial in their own cases. 

The case of Joaquin S. Rams could soon become part of a growing national backlash over the government’s use of testimony from “snitches” — inmates who offer information against other inmates in exchange for lighter sentences or other benefits — to obtain convictions, sparked by a significant number of wrongful convictions attributed to false informant testimony.”

FBI pressures Muslim immigrants to become informants

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This Buzzfeed article– Welcome to America–Now Spy on Your Friends — describes how the FBI routinely interferes with the immigration process in order to exert pressure on immigrants from Muslim countries to provide information.  As the article puts it, “[w]hen Muslim immigrants apply to become citizens, they often find the process delayed for years without explanation. Then, when they are at wit’s end, they get a visit from the FBI, with an offer they don’t dare refuse.”

See also this 2013 ACLU report, Muslims Need Not Apply.

Reliability hearings in Washington state

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The Washington State House and Senate are considering bills that would institute pretrial reliability hearings in which judges would evaluate informant witnesses for unreliability before those informants could testify in front of juries. The House version would mandate the hearings; the Senate version gives judges discretion over whether to hold them or not.  News coverage from the Associated Press here.

Reliability hearings are one of many important tools available to combat unreliable informants and avoid wrongful conviction, including corroboration requirements, stronger and earlier discovery requirements, jury instructions, and limits on when and how informants can be used.  The Washington legislation thus represents an important first step.  It is motivated in part by the wrongful convictions of three young Washington residents several years ago who were convicted based on the testimony of a highly unreliable compensated informant.