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.
Incentives & Payments
The criminal informant model spreads to the SEC
The Los Angeles Times reports that the SEC wants to emulate the IRS’s bounty program for rewarding criminal informants: SEC chief wants to catch investment scammers in the act. I posted about the IRS program here: IRS expands use of informants. This trend towards courting criminal informants in white collar investigations, as opposed to innocent whistleblowers, is part of a larger systemic culture in which guilt has become completely negotiable. The IRS, for example, used to balk at rewarding offending informants who actually participated in the wrongdoing, but its new rules make it easier to do. To be sure, there are immense informational benefits to using offenders as snitches–they tend to have more information than innocent bystanders. But it squarely raises one of the central compromises that has dogged criminal snitching in drug and mafia investigations, which is that the process can forgive and even reward serious wrongdoers. The IRS and SEC should think carefully about the extent to which they are willing to emulate the world of drug enforcement, in which guilt and punishment have become percevied as commodities, in which cooperation can become a kind of get-out-of-jail-free card, and in which law enforcement is too often seen as tolerating crime and even violence from its informants in order to secure information.
“The Forfeiture Racket”
Here’s another important story from Radley Balko at Reason Magazine entitled “The Forfeiture Racket.” It chronicles the disturbing history of our powerful drug forfeiture laws, and how governments have seized literally billions of dollars from innocent people. Here’s an excerpt:
Over the past three decades, it has become routine in the United States for state, local, and federal governments to seize the property of people who were never even charged with, much less convicted of, a crime. Nearly every year, according to Justice Department statistics, the federal government sets new records for asset forfeiture. And under many state laws, the situation is even worse: State officials can seize property without a warrant and need only show “probable cause” that the booty was connected to a drug crime in order to keep it, as opposed to the criminal standard of proof “beyond a reasonable doubt.” Instead of being innocent until proven guilty, owners of seized property all too often have a heavier burden of proof than the government officials who stole their stuff.
According to Balko, the U.S. Justice Department’s forfeiture fund reached $3.1 billion in 2008; less than 20 percent of seizures involved property belonging to people who were actually prosecuted.
Informants play an important role in forfeiture. Not only can the government rely on informants to meet its evidentiary burden of showing that the property is connected to criminal activity, but under federal law, informants can receive bounties of as much as 25 percent of the value of the seized assets. For an overview of U.S. informant-forfeiture practices, see Joachin Alemany, United States Contracts with Informants: An Illusory Promise?, 33 Univ. of Miami Inter-American Law Rev. 251 (2002).
Informants Killing Informants
To what extent should the government employ and reward murderers, drug dealers, and other criminals as informants? In a developing case in Texas, the U.S. government is trying to figure out who killed one of its Mexican drug cartel informants. Turns out it might have been another U.S.-run informant. Story here.
I bring up this incident because it illustrates a bunch of key issues. One is just a matter of scale: there are now so many informants in the system that we get cases like these in which the government is running the people on both sides of the crime. That’s how deep the phenomenon runs.
Second: The government routinely permits serious criminals to remain at large because they are useful, even though they are highly likely to commit new crimes. As one former U.S. special agent remarked about the Texas case, federal officials knew that their informant’s job was tracking down people that the cartel wanted to execute. Given that, they “probably should have known he was conspiring to kill someone.” Now they’re mad because he may have killed one of their other informants. The problem of government-tolerated snitch crime is an old problem. Check out the 2004 congressional report at the left entitled “Everything Secret Degenerates: The FBI’s Use of Murderers as Informants.” Congress found it appalling that the FBI let known mob murderers remain at large because they were snitching on their rival mafia counterparts. In Chapter Five of my book, I document how the toleration for informant wrongdoing is widespread and can worsen crime and insecurity in inner city communities.
Finally, the Texas story reminded me of Troy Smith. As part of his informant deal, Troy Smith had to produce six arrests of other people in order to avoid drug charges himself. When he tried to sell meth to another informant as part of his quota, he got busted. Because of a procedural mistake by his lawyer, Smith could not raise the “public authority” defense, i.e. the claim that the government authorized him to commit the crime. Smith is currently serving a 12-year sentence, arguably for doing exactly what the government told him to do. I tell this story not only because it seems ironic and unfair, but because the pervasive use of informants invites precisely this kind of debacle.