Informant Crime

This piece from Ted Rohrlich, who is now writing for Injustice Watch, chronicles the use of two Mexican Mafia informants in Southern California who sometimes threatened their cellmates to get them to confess.  The informants, whose work came to light as part of the Orange County snitch scandal, were paid over $300,000 over six years by law enforcement in multiple counties.  They also received numerous breaks and perks.  From the story “Miranda ‘loophole’: CA police use gang enforcers to win cellmate confessions”:

  “[C]onfessions did not always flow, and in several cases, court records show, the enforcers-turned-informants—like other Southern California jailhouse informants before them—resorted to death threats to provoke suspects to talk. They claimed suspects were on “green light” lists of inmates that Mexican Mafia leaders had ordered killed because they were believed to have broken a Mexican Mafia rule. But if they confessed—admitting the killing of which they were suspected but denying that they had broken the rule—the enforcers-turned informants could go to bat for them and have them removed from the lists.”

The constitutional law here is interesting.  In Illinois v Perkins, the Supreme Court held that the government can deploy jailhouse informants against incarcerated inmates to get confessions without Miranda warnings, as long as those inmates have not yet been charged with a crime.  But the Court also held in Arizona v. Fulminante that the use of threats to extort confessions can render those confessions involuntary in violation of due process.

This story also deserves attention because of who wrote it–no one knows jailhouse snitches like Ted Rohrlich does.  He was the Los Angeles Times reporter who broke a series of stories in the late 1980s about the rampant use of informants in the LA County jail.  That series helped trigger a ground breaking 1990 grand jury investigation which remains one of the most important sources for insights about jailhouse informant use.