Snitching

Criminal Informant Law, Policy, and Research

Blog

Zocalo video interview

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Here’s a link to a video interview I did with Zocalo. Zocalo is a wonderful cultural and civic organization that presents speakers, videos, conferences, and other forms of discussion around key public issues. From their website:

Zocalo takes on compelling ideas from a wide range of fields-politics, governance, health, economics, technology, foreign policy, arts, science and beyond. Believing that over-specialization and narrowcasting undermine the public square, Zocalo seeks to restore broad-mindedness to civic and intellectual life and to welcome a new, young and diverse generation to the conversation. Since 2003, Zocalo has roamed around Los Angeles, to Chicago, New Orleans, San Francisco and as far as Shanghai, Berlin and Guadalajara. We have featured over 800 thinkers and doers online and on the ground, using our live events to build community and feed the open, accessible, non-partisan spirit of our magazine.

Gregory Taylor exonerated by North Carolina innocence commission

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The North Carolina Innocence Inquiry Commission declared yesterday that Gregory Taylor was wrongfully convicted of murder, 17 years ago, based on a combination of undisclosed forensic evidence, flawed eyewitness testimony, and a jailhouse snitch. L.A. Times story here; see also here for details of the hearing. North Carolina is the only state to have created a governmental commission that directly reviews post-conviction innocence claims, although other states are considering it given the large number of exonerations in recent years. Several states (e.g. California, Texas, Illinois, Wisconsin) have commissions to review the systemic sources of wrongful convictions and to propose reforms. See previous post.

Another wrongful conviction in the making?

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The Pacific Northwest Inlander just published this story, entitled Reasonable Doubt, about the recent robbery convictions of Tyler Gassman, Paul Statler, and Robert Larson. The sole evidence against the young defendants was the testimony of Matt Dunham, a confessed drug dealer and robber himself, who named Gassman and the two others as accomplices in a series of unsolved robberies. In exchange for his testimony, Dunham received a light sentence for his own robbery charge–18 months in a juvenile facility; by contrast, Gassman received 25 years. Two weeks after the verdict, Dunham’s accomplice, Anthony Kongchunji, came forward and confessed that he and Dunham had conspired to pin the unsolved crimes on Gassman and the others in order to get deals for themselves, their friends, and relatives. The trial court denied the defendants’ motion for a new trial, and the case is currently on appeal.

“Used, Abused and Tossed”: informants and immigration

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Here’s part 3 of the NPR series on informants–this one focuses on how ICE sometimes uses non-citizens as informants and then lets them be deported once they are no longer useful: Retired Drug Informant Says He Was Burned (NPR), and Informants can greatly aid US authories but still face deportation (LA Times). Deportation poses special dangers to informants, who may be killed upon returning to their home countries, in much the same way that domestic informants face special dangers in local jails and prisons or even on the streets. The government is under little legal obligation to protect its sources. For example, after he gave his FBI handler a tip, Charles Shuler was shot and paralyzed because the FBI blew his cover. A court dismissed Shuler’s lawsuit, ruling that the FBI did not owe him protection. Stories like these reflect the more general phenomenon that informants who lack counsel, education, or other resources are often vulnerable to official exploitation.