Snitching

Criminal Informant Law, Policy, and Research

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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.

60 Minutes on young informants

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On Sunday, 60 Minutes ran this segment entitled “Young people going undercover in war on drugs.”  The story covered several examples that have been in the news, including the recent Buzzfeed investigation into the student informant program at Ole Miss, the death of college student Andrew Sadek in North Dakota, and the death of Rachel Hoffman in Florida.  More examples are here.  For a thorough look at the ways that young informants are pressured and used, read the New Yorker article The Throwaways.

Call for federal investigation of Orange County

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The jailhouse snitch scandal in Orange County continues to escalate.  In November, Dean Erwin Chemerinsky, former California Attorney General John Van de Kamp, and numerous other legal experts (including me), called for a federal investigation.  Here is the letter to U.S. Attorney General Lynch.  A month earlier, the New York Times Editorial Board identified the “blatant and systemic misconduct in the Orange County District Attorney’s Office” and also called for a federal investigation.  Meanwhile, the OC Register published this special report entitled “How jailhouse informants and the ‘snitch tank’ put Orange County justice system in turmoil.”

BuzzFeed investigation into student informants

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BuzzFeed has been running a revealing investigation into how police–including campus police at Ole Miss–in Oxford, Mississippi have been pressuring students and college-age residents into becoming informants.  Here are links to the most recent articles:

How Mississippi Discovered The Drug War’s “Golden Egg” (April 20, 2015): A small-town narcotics unit has built a team of confidential informants by arresting low-level-offender college students and pressuring them to flip.

How Mississippi Cops Threaten College-Age Kids Into Becoming Informants (Oct. 1, 2015): A recording of two officers from Oxford, Mississippi’s Metro Narcotics unit sheds light on how the unit pressures college-age suspects into becoming informants.

From the most recent article:

“[E]ach year Metro Narcotics enlists an average of 30 informants, most of whom have little connection to the drug scene other than as low-level buyers. Around half of the 240 or so people arrested by Metro Narcotics in 2014 were first-time offenders, and the unit made three times as many arrests for marijuana as for any other drug. To get these young men and women to cooperate, the unit’s four agents often threaten them with prison sentences or a life-long drug record.”

The article also includes transcripts of a conversation between police and two young potential informants in which police threatened the young pregnant woman with an unrealistical 30-year sentence, and got her boyfriend–who had no drug charges or contacts–to agree to become a drug informant to ‘work off’ his girlfriend’s charge.  The two young people initially agreed, but then decided not to become informants after they consulted with an attorney. 

9th Circuit panel intervenes in prosecutorial misconduct

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During appellate argument, a Ninth Circuit panel of federal judges lambasted the California Attorney General’s office for failing to discipline a prosecutor who lied about rewarding a jailhouse snitch.  Los Angeles Times story and video of argument (beginning at 16:00 minutes) here.  The panel, which included Judges Kozinski, Wardlaw and Fletcher, instructed the government attorney to go back to his office and tell the Attorney General to act on the matter.