Snitching

Criminal Informant Law, Policy, and Research

Families & Youth

Troy Howlett’s mother sues Virginia police for wrongful death

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In 2018, police in Hopewell, Virginia, pressured Troy Howlett into becoming a drug informant, sitting by his hospital bed as he recovered from an overdose. Months later he died from a fentanyl overdose. His mother, Donna Watson, filed a wrongful death claim against the police, arguing that with full knowledge of Troy’s addiction they coerced him into buying drugs that exposed him to continued drug use and a high risk of overdose. Her case was initially dismissed by the court; it is currently on appeal. For indepth coverage see this story from WTVR, “Her son was a police informant. She blames them for his death,” and this piece from The New Republic: “Her Son Needed Help. First, He Had to Help the Police.”

The New Republic also interviewed another former Hopewell informant. The father of her child was facing criminal charges and police came to her with a deal: if she worked for them, it could help reduce his sentence. Pregnant and with a history of substance abuse of her own, she worked for police for a month and relapsed.

For more stories about the widespread harms to vulnerable informants, see post about Matthew Klaus who died of an overdose while working for police, and also How police turn teens into informants.

Parents testify in support of Matthew’s Law in Minnesota

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In 2019, Matthew Klaus died of a drug overdose while working as a confidential informant for Minnesota police. He was a recovering heroin addict who relapsed while working for the police; he was instructed to buy from the dealer who eventually sold him a fatal dose. His parents, John and Denise Klaus, are advocating for a new law that would protect recovering addicts like Matthew from being used as drug informants. See the Star Tribune story here: After son’s fatal overdose, Oronoco couple champion law reforming police use of informants. The proposed legislation is here.

How police turn teens into informants

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Check out this interview with Nick Taiber, former City Council member in Cedar Falls, Iowa, who became an drug informant when he was a teenager, and Luke Hunt, former FBI agent and now professor.  Taiber describes how police pressured him at age 17 to become an informant after a car accident.  Hunt says “What’s most troubling to me is a very common scenario in which the police compel an informant to do certain operational acts because they have a tremendous amount of power and leverage over the person.” More here from Slate: How Police Turn Teens Into Informants. 

The past few years have seen new attention to the youth informant phenomenon.  Sarah Stillman’s tour-de-force article The Throwaways came out in the New Yorker in 2012; since then there have been numerous media stories regarding college students and other young people pressured into become informants, often with terrible consequences for them and their families.

ICE marks 17-year-old informant for deportation and death

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ProPublica and New York Magazine published this story about Henry, a teenager in Brentwood, Long Island, who agreed to inform on his MS-13 gang to the FBI.  The federal government then decided to deport him back to El Salvador, leaving him unprotected against the gang:  A Betrayal:  The teenager told police all about his gang, MS-13. In return, he was slated for deportation and marked for death.  From the story:

“Under normal circumstances, Henry’s choice would have been his salvation. By working with the police, he could have escaped the gang and started fresh. But not in the dawning of the Trump era, when every immigrant has become a target and local police in towns like Brentwood have become willing agents in a nationwide campaign of detention and deportation.”

For other instances where the government has failed to protect immigrant informants, see these posts.

More broadly, the government often pressures or incentivizes immigrants to give information which is then used to deport them.  This law review article surveys the law, and argues that such policies are counterproductive: Amanda Frost, Can the Government Deport Immigrants Using Information it Encouraged Them to Provide?  Administrative Law Review, Vol. 2, No. 97, 2017. Here is the abstract:

“This Essay describes the legal and policy issues raised by any systematic effort to deport unauthorized immigrants based on information the government invited them to provide. Part I briefly surveys some of the major laws, regulations, and programs that encourage unauthorized immigrants to identify themselves. Part II analyzes the strengths and weaknesses of the statutory and constitutional arguments that immigrants could raise as a defense against deportations based on self-reported data. Part III explains that even if the government’s systematic use of such data to deport unauthorized immigrants is legal, doing so would be a poor policy choice for any administration, even one that seeks to drastically increase deportations. The federal government has always balanced immigration enforcement against other goals and values, such as deterring crime, protecting wages and working conditions, collecting taxes, and preventing U.S. citizen children from being separated from their parents. Deporting immigrants based on information provided in the service of these greater goals would elevate immigration enforcement over all other federal policies. Furthermore, doing so would almost immediately render these laws a dead letter, since no rational unauthorized immigrant would apply for visas or pay taxes if doing so were tantamount to self-deportation. Accordingly, any increase in removals from the use of such data is sure to be fleeting, while the damage done to immigrants’—and perhaps all citizens’—trust in the government will be permanent.”

North Dakota passes cutting edge legislation

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In the wake of the death of college student Andrew Sadek, North Dakota has passed Andrew’s Law, an important piece of legislation that sets a new standard in informant reform.  Some of the most heartening aspects of the bill are as follows:

  • It bans the use of informants who are 15 years old or younger. Only California and New Jersey currently ban the use of juvenile informants at the state level, and their cutoff is 12 years old.  
  • College police may not use college students as informants.
  • Police officers must be trained before they use informants.
  • All informant agreements must be in writing. The agreement must include, among other things, an explanation of what the informant is expected to do and what benefit they can expect to receive.  This is particularly important since young and vulnerable informants may not know what is expected of them, and law enforcement may continue to use them without clear boundaries or limits.
  • The agreement must tell the informant of their right to consult with counsel.
  • The agreement must warn the informant that the work may be dangerous.
  • The bill creates procedures for complaints, and an investigative process when an informant is killed.
This legislation is the culmination of a decade-long public debate over vulnerable informants that has been brewing since 23-year-old Rachel Hoffman was killed in Florida in 2008.  Since then, we have learned about the rampant, unregulated use of young informants, and how some campus police pressure college students into risking their education and even their lives.  North Dakota’s new law is one of the best responses so far.  More details from the Huffington Post here.