Snitching

Criminal Informant Law, Policy, and Research

Incentives & Payments

ABC News: “A Necessary Evil: The Cost of Confidential Informants”

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This extensive investigation by KSAT ABC Channel 12 delves into the use of unreliable drug informants, planted drugs, lack of supervision, and a host of other debacles that led to the wrongful conviction of multiple people in San Antonio, Bexar County, Texas. You can watch the hour-long special here; for additional videos, interviews and resources, check out their Confidential Informant page.

This kind of large scale drug scandal happens more frequently than you might think. See these previous posts for additional examples in Florida, Tennessee, and Texas.

Chicago jailhouse confessions admitted after informant reliability hearing

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In an early test of Illinois’s new reliability hearing requirement, a judge held that three men would be permitted to testify at trial after vetting them in a pre-trial informant reliability hearing. All three alleged that the defendant had confessed to them while incarcerated. The judge based his ruling in part on his finding that “no deal, no promises, no inducements or benefits were made by the state.”

Jack Abramoff: classic repeat offender informant

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Remember Jack Abramoff, the corrupt lobbyist who defrauded Indian tribes of millions and used the money to bribe members of Congress and White House officials?  In 2008 he was sentenced to four years of incarceration for multiple offenses, decades less than he might have received, in exchange for his cooperation.  Now Abramoff is headed back to prison for . . .  corrupt lobbying.  Abramoff joins a long line of repeat offender informants who commit serious crimes, cooperate in exchange for leniency, and then continue committing those very same offenses.  It is one of the costs of running the criminal system as a marketplace in which guilt and information can be so easily and routinely traded: we send the message that informants can earn impunity, and that they can work off even the most serious crimes if they are useful enough to the government.  I worried about the Abramoff case back in 2009 here.  As I wrote back then, “this is the perennial dilemma with snitches: it is very hard to know whether we are actually getting more security and justice by letting them off the hook, or whether we too easily forgive serious wrongdoing in the name of cooperation.”

Japan considers snitching

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Japan is introducing American-style plea bargaining in which defendants can trade information about others in exchange for leniency.  Some are concerned about the risks of snitching in general, and of wrongful convictions in particular.  The law is more limited than the U.S. version, and only permits certain kinds of deals and only for certain kinds of crimes.  From the Japan Times:

“Unlike the U.S. plea bargaining system, admitting to a crime does not warrant a deal with prosecutors in Japan. The new system, introduced in a revision to the criminal procedure law, allows suspects in such crimes as bribery, embezzlement, tax fraud and drug smuggling to negotiate with prosecutors. The bargaining only applies to crimes listed in the law, with murder and assault off-limits.”

Multimillion-dollar drug bounties for informants

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Bloomberg recently explored the State Department’s Narcotics Reward Program which offers bounties for information on high-ranking drug traffickers: America’s Multimillion-Dollar Bounty Program Just for Drug Lords.   As always, the program accepts the risk of rewarding and protecting serious, violent criminals in exchange for information about other potentially more serious, violent criminals.  As the article notes, “[c]ritics of the government’s rewards programs warn that huge cash bounties increase cartel violence and encourage corruption among U.S. law enforcement personnel. But the program’s success is hard to dismiss, its proponents contend.”  Other agencies, including the IRS and the SEC, offer large bounties to informants as well.