Snitching

Criminal Informant Law, Policy, and Research

Forensics

Hawaii wrongful conviction used snitches to bolster weak DNA evidence

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Albert “Ian” Schweitzer spent 25 years in prison for a murder he did not commit, based on faulty DNA testing and two different lying informants–one drug defendant and one jailhouse informant. The first informant received probation instead of significant jailtime and avoided federal prosecution. The jailhouse snitch avoided retrial and a potential 10-year sentence. Story from the Hawaii Innocence Project here: Ian Schweitzer Exonerated of Murder After 25 Years in Hawaii. Thanks to Radley Balko’s The Watch for highlighting the story.

The case is an example of a larger forensic problem. Jailhouse snitch testimony often comes into existence in order to bolster weak cases. High profile murders tend to generate snitch testimony since informants know that rewards are forthcoming. The problem is worse for weak cases: if the case were strong, the government wouldn’t need the snitch. The confluence creates a pernicious storm of inaccuracy where bad evidence makes other bad evidence look better than it actually is. For more examples see this previous post about dog sniff and arson bolstering.

Connecticut Supreme Court issues decision on informant experts

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The Connecticut Supreme Court has decided that informant experts like myself are admissible when they can provide specialized information to jurors about informant unreliability, namely, information that jurors would not otherwise know based on common sense or from the popular culture or general media.  The Supreme Court upheld the exclusion of my testimony in this particular case, but noted that such testimony is not per se inadmissible, and it imagined other scenarios in which expert testimony might be admitted. The 2019 case, State v. Leniart, overturned this 2016 decision, in which the Connecticut Court of Appeals held that the trial judge made a mistake in preventing me from testifying before the jury.

I explain what the Leniart decision means in more detail in this piece for The Appeal: Why Juries Need Expert Help Assessing Jailhouse Informants.  In particular, I explain why jurors are unlikely to understand the full scope of informant practices, fabrications, and motivations to lie, and therefore would be helped by hearing expert testimony:

“Informants are highly motivated to give persuasive, believable testimony in exchange for their own freedom. They can also receive money, drugs, sex, food, and phone privileges when they cooperate with jail officials. Some scour the newspapers, pay other inmates for information, or get family members to pull court records so that they can come up with incriminating testimony against their cellmates. Some jurors may already know about these sorts of practices; many will not.”

The developing science of informant cognition

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Behavioral psychologists have been studying the informant phenomenon, especially the thorny question of why jurors believe unreliable informants even when they know that the informants have strong incentives to fabricate evidence.  Some of those studies can be found here in the Resources & Scholarship section.

A group of researchers recently published this study finding that information from an informant can affect other witnesses in a case. Specifically, the study found that eyewitnesses who identified suspects in a line-up actually changed their identifications after learning that a jailhouse informant had implicated a different suspect.  Here is the abstract:

“Prior research has shown that primary confession evidence can alter eyewitnesses’ identifications and self-reported confidence. The present study investigated whether secondary confession evidence from a jailhouse informant could have the same effect. Participants (N = 368) watched a video of an armed robbery and made an identification decision from a photo lineup. Except for those in the no-feedback conditions, all participants then read that certain lineup members either confessed to the crime, denied involvement, or were implicated by a jailhouse informant. Jailhouse informant testimony implicating the identified lineup member led participants to have significantly higher confidence in their identification. In contrast, jailhouse informant testimony that implicated a lineup member other than the identified led participants to have significantly lower confidence in their initial identification, and 80% of these witnesses changed their identification. These results indicate that jailhouse informant testimony can influence eyewitnesses’ confidence and their identification decisions.”

Preston M. Mote & Jeffrey S. Neuschatz & Brian H. Bornstein & Stacy A. Wetmore & Kylie N. Key, Secondary Confessions as Post-identification Feedback: How Jailhouse Informant Testimony Can Alter Eyewitnesses’ Identification Decisions, Journal of Police and Criminal Psychology (2018).

We already know that informant testimony can arise to bolster weak cases, providing corroboration for faulty forensic evidence or uncertain eyewitness identifications.  This new study suggests that in addition to bolstering, informant testimony can actually alter other witnesses’ testimony. 

Experiments on the impact of inducements

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Scholars at the University of Arizona Law School have published a paper entitled “Incentives, Lies and Disclosure,” 20 U. Pa. J. Con L. 33 (2018).  They conduct a number of behavioral experiments and conclude that incentivized witnesses like jailhouse informants are more likely to lie, and that even when potential jurors are told about the incentives, they still believe the witness.  Here is the abstract:  

Prosecutors can force witnesses to testify and use perjury prosecutions to hold them to the provable truth. More controversially, prosecutors also offer witnesses inducements for favorable testimony, including leniency, immunity, and even cash. This ubiquitous behavior would be illegal as witness bribery, except for a longstanding tradition of sovereigns using this power, which legal doctrine now reflects. A causal analysis shows that even if prosecutors use this power only in good faith, these inducements undermine the epistemic value of witness testimony. 

Due process requires, and legal doctrine assumes, that when such inducements are disclosed to the jury, they will discount the witness testimony accordingly. However, juries’ success in doing so is an empirical question. We conducted three randomized experiments with 1,000 human subjects in roles of witnesses and jurors deciding vignettes based on real cases. We find that incentives have large effects on witnesses, allowing prosecutors to routinely procure favorable testimony regardless of its truth. Yet, disclosure has no detectable effects on either witnesses or jurors. 

We discuss two potential reforms. First, courts could borrow from the practice with expert witnesses and use the current rules of evidence to conduct Daubert-like pretrial screening of incentivized witnesses for reliability. We frame the appropriate counterfactual question about whether the incentives would cause a witness to give the same testimony even if it were false. Second, we present the novel suggestion that prosecutors could decide whether to offer benefits to a witness based on whether she will testify to material information, but without knowing whether the information is favorable to the Government. These mechanisms may preserve the value of incentives to produce information, while minimizing false testimony.

“The Prosecutor and the Snitch”

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In this extensive review of the infamous Cameron Todd Willingham case, the Marshall Project zeroes in on the role of the jailhouse informant, Johnny Webb, and the prosecutor who covered up his rewards.  Story here: The Prosecutor and the Snitch: Did Texas execute an innocent man?  According to the article, Webb “lied on the witness stand in return for efforts by the former prosecutor, John H. Jackson, to reduce Webb’s prison sentence for robbery and to arrange thousands of dollars in support from a wealthy Corsicana rancher. Newly uncovered letters and court files show that Jackson worked diligently to intercede for Webb after his testimony and to coordinate with the rancher, Charles S. Pearce Jr., to keep the mercurial informer in line.”

In post-trial interviews, Webb said that the prosecutor approached him about testifying:

“[H]e asked Jackson, “What’s going to be my deal?” and Jackson said, “If you help me, that robbery will disappear … even if you’re convicted now, I can get it off of you later.”  …“He says, ‘Your story doesn’t have to match exactly… He says, ‘I want you to just say he put fires in the corners. I need you to be able to say that so we can convict him, otherwise we’re going to have a murderer running our streets.’ ” …  “He [Jackson] had me believing 100 percent this dude was guilty — that’s why I testified,” Webb said. “The perks — they was willing to do anything to help me. No one has ever done that, so why wouldn’t I help them?” In fact, Webb said, Willingham “never told me nothing.”