Snitching

Criminal Informant Law, Policy, and Research

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Young informant commits suicide

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A significant problem that has not yet received sufficient attention: protecting young and vulnerable informants. This story in the Missoulian is about how police handled Colton Peterson, a suicidal 21-year-old who was working for them as a drug informant: “Family believes son’s suicide partly caused by law enforcement’s conscription as an informant.” The story raises some of the same issues that caused Florida to pass “Rachel’s law” after 23-year-old Rachel Hoffman was killed while working as an informant. See these previous posts: “Florida’s ‘Rachel’s Law’ offers some protection for informants” and “Recruiting new informants.” Under Florida’s new law, police must now consider certain minimum factors before recruiting a person as an informant, including the person’s “age and maturity,” and “whether the person has shown any indication of emotional instability.” My deepest condolences to Colton’s parents, Juliena Darling and Frank Peterson.

Motion to Preclude Creation of Snitch Testimony

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The Kansas Death Penalty Defense Unit recently filed this motion asking the court to take protective measures to prevent jailhouse snitches from being created in the case of Kansas v. Adam Longoria. Asserting that “Mr. Longoria has no intention of talking to anyone but his attorneys about the facts of this case,” the motion requests that the court “take measures to ensure that no jailhouse snitches or other suspect informants are created in this case to manufacture evidence for the state.” This proactive defense tactic appears to be getting more common (see previous post: Interesting effort to preempt jailhouse snitching).

Thank you

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As my brief tenure as a guest blogger here comes to an end, I just want to thank everyone for reading my contributions. I hope that I have been able to add in a meaningful way to discussions about how best to use, manage, protect, and recruit informants. For those of you who are interested, I hope that you will keep tabs on my profile on SSRN, where I hope soon to be posting my most recent work on informants, including an article discussing the moral status of informing and how that status should impact when and how police and prosecutors recruit and use informants and another contemplating the propriety and value of police encouraging civilians to commit immoral acts in the name of fighting crime. Until then, thank you.

Jailhouse snitches for the defense

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The Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court recently rejected a motion by Calvin Carnes, a convicted killer, to stay his appeal pending his attempts to seek a new trial on the ground that the prosecution withheld exculpatory evidence. The evidence in question was an affidavit of a jailhouse informant who claimed that Robert Turner, one of Carnes’s accomplices, confessed to the homicides. The Suffolk District Attorney’s Office justified waiting eighteen months to turn over the affidavit on the ground that they had needed time to check out the informant’s story, meet with Turner’s attorneys, and, assuming the informant’s story was true, allow Turner more time to make incriminating statements. The prosecutors further argued that the delay didn’t matter because the informant was “unreliable and untrustworthy based on his extensive criminal history and the fact that he was giving inaccurate and incomplete information.” The response of Ellen Zucker, Carnes’s attorney, is worth quoting in full:

Prosecutors use jailhouse snitches all the time when they’re seeking prosecution of somebody. In each case, they have a profile not dissimilar to Mr. Smith, [the informant in this case]. It would be very curious if the district attorney took the standard they’re applying to Mr. Smith and applied it to every jailhouse snitch they put on the stand to try to get a conviction.

Of course, a lying informant is not valuable to anyone, and it is in everyone’s best interest for the state to ensure that informants are not permitted to lie. And in the ideal world, the police and prosecutors would exert just as much effort to test the veracity of informant’s testifying for them as they do when an informant wishes to provide unhelpful testimony. But if the history of informant use has taught us anything, it is that the combination of more-or-less unbridled prosecutorial discretion, secrecy in the handling of informants, and zeal for convictions has led to inconsistent stances by states depending on whether they are relying upon or attempting to rebut informant testimony. In other words, every jailhouse informant is a lying rat unless he’s testifying for your side.