Dynamics of Snitching

Violent robber-snitch formed new home invasion gang

May 10, 2010 by Alexandra Natapoff

Thanks to Grits for Breakfast for this story from the Dallas Morning News:

A confessed robber out on bond after he masterminded a series of violent North Texas home invasions apparently formed a new gang and went right back to his old ways.

In February 2008, William Sedric Autrey reached a plea deal with prosecutors and agreed to work as an undercover informant against others in a gang believed responsible for dozens of home invasions and burglaries between 2005 and 2008.

He was out on bond for almost two years, after negotiating a plea deal to ensure he would not spend more than 15 years behind bars. Authorities say that while he was free, Autrey, 41, formed a new gang that burst into houses, exchanged gunfire with a Dallas homeowner and burglarized and robbed almost two dozen homes around the area since November.

By now the story of criminal informants who continue to commit crimes while working for the government is depressingly familiar news; see, for example, these posts: Killer FBI Informant, and House of Death informant and Committing Crime While Working for the Government. Ongoing crime is an inherent feature of the snitching phenomenon, at least in the U.S. (some countries formally restrict their governments’ authority to tolerate informant crime, but the U.S. is not yet one of them.) Accordingly, we need to figure out whether snitching is worth it. Do we solve more crimes than we permit with these deals? When criminal informants re-offend, can we tell the victims that their suffering produced a greater good? In Dallas, the prosecutor said that Autrey “‘cooperated and helped get indictments on cases that involved hundreds of thousands of dollars’ in mortgage fraud, student loan fraud and other white-collar crimes. He also said that Autrey continued to work with authorities on violent crimes, including some home invasion robberies committed by other people.” Is that worth the dozens of robberies that Autrey continued to commit, including one in which robbers shot at a homeowner, and another in which they tied up a 15-year-old girl?

We can’t have a full public debate about these questions because the government doesn’t produce the data–we don’t know how many crimes informants commit and solve. This is a central reason why I argue that data collection and transparency reforms are so fundamental. As I wrote in the book’s introduction:

“The most important [snitching reform] is the most difficult: changing the culture of secrecy and deregulation that permits informants and officials alike to bend rules, evade accountability, and operate in secret. It is this culture that fosters snitching’s worst dangers: wrongful convictions, unchecked criminal behavior, official corruption, public deception, and the weakened legitimacy of the criminal process in the eyes of its constituents. It is also the feature that prevents us from addressing the ultimate public policy questions with clarity. The system currently handles the problem by asking us to accept on faith that unregulated snitching is worth its risks, without either demonstrating its full benefits or revealing its true costs. For a public policy of this far-reaching importance, such faith is not enough.”

Snitches killing snitches

April 26, 2010 by Alexandra Natapoff

Here’s a story of violent irony. Last Friday, two young New Jersey women were sentenced for participating in the execution of a friend–Latyria Nealy–because the gang to which all three women belonged thought Nealy might be snitching. Having lured Nealy to her death on suspicion of being a snitch, one of the women, Nikki Moore, then became an informant herself, providing “significant, extensive, and comprehensive” cooperation which earned her two years off her 12-year sentence. The other defendant apparently also cooperated in some fashion but did not get any credit. Story here: Pair Sentenced in Gang Execution: Asbury Park Woman Killed for being a ‘Snitch’. The irony, of course, lies in the cycle of violence in which people work off their sentences for killing suspected informants by becoming informants themselves. The deeper challenge is helping young people surrounded by crime who are caught in the middle–between violent gangs that threaten those who talk, and a criminal system that punishes those who remain silent.

Jury finds police violated victim’s rights by using false “snitch” label

April 19, 2010 by Alexandra Natapoff

Last week, a federal jury decided that two Los Angeles police officers violated a young woman’s constitutional rights by falsely labeling her a snitch–a label that led to her death–and then failing to protect her. L.A. Times stories here and here. In an effort to get gang member Jose Ledesma to confess to a murder, police told him that Puebla had identified him as the shooter, even forging her signature on a fake photo array, although Puebla never identified Ledesma. At the same time, the jury found that Puebla and her parents also contributed to her death, and awarded no money to the family.

This is an interesting case for a number of reasons. First, the government is rarely held accountable for its use of or failure to protect informants, so the jury’s conclusion that the police violated Puebla’s constitutional rights by using her in the ruse and then failing to protect her could support future cases. Here is a link to the complaint in the case: Puebla v. Los Angeles, Case No. 08-3128. For another example of the trend(?) towards greater protection for informants–particularly young vulnerable ones–see this post on Florida’s new informant legislation. At the same time, the Los Angeles jury apparently believed that Puebla and her family significantly contributed to her danger–finding the family 80% responsible and the police only 20% at fault. While it is unclear from the Times article why the jury came to this conclusion, the public and the criminal system often blame informants for their own injuries or even death, on the theory that they take the risk by becoming informants in the first place. In this case, the government argued that Puebla was killed, not because of the police ruse, but because she testified months later at a hearing in which she said that Ledesma was gang-affiliated.

Even jurors were worried about informant reliability

March 14, 2010 by Alexandra Natapoff

On Friday, a Denver jury convicted Willie Clark in the killing of Denver Bronco Darrent Williams during a drive-by shooting. Much of the case, although not all, was based on the testimony of heavily rewarded criminal informants. Stories here and here. One witness in particular, Daniel “Ponytail” Harris, admitted to being in the car from which the bullets came, and testified that he saw Clark, and only Clark, shoot out the window at the limousine in which Williams was riding. Harris was facing a life sentence for an unrelated federal drug charge, but in exchange for his testimony, he will see that sentence cut down to five years. He will also avoid being prosecuted for the shooting himself. Another witness, gang member Vernone Edwards, will get a decade shaved off his crack-cocaine trafficking sentence. This sort of heavily compensated, self-serving testimony is one of the prime reasons that informant testimony has become such a problematic source of error. Three alternate and released jurors who spoke to reporters after the case was over said they did not believe Harris. One of the lead prosecutors in Harris’s drug case candidly explained that prosecutors can only do their best to determine whether such witnesses are telling the truth.

It used to be that informant unreliability issues were litigated, if at all, on habeas, or by volunteer attorneys at innocence projects long after the case was over. Those days are coming to an end. With heightened public and media awareness of the problem, I predict that we will see more cases in which the problem of informant reliability is addressed early on in the process, at trial or on appeal, and not, as so often has happened in the past, as an afterthought or not at all.