An appellate court in Maryland has ruled that a comment on the defendant’s girlfriend’s MySpace page was properly admitted at his murder trial. The comment read: “Free Boozy!!! Just remember snitches get stitches!! U know who you are!!” Daily Record story here. The comment was proffered by the government to explain why a key witness had failed to identify the defendant at a previous trial. The decision is significant for a number of reasons. For example, it shows how comments made on social networking sites by friends and family may be admissible against defendants. It also elevates common phrases such as “snitches get stitches” and “no snitching” and potentially even rap lyrics to the status of specific threat. For a more general discussion of the use of rap lyrics against defendants, see this post: “”Stop Snitching” rap song on YouTube leads to convictions.”
Informant Law
Attorney General Holder memo on prosecutorial charging decisions
Thanks to Sentencing Law and Policy for making Attorney General Eric Holder’s new charging policy memo available here. The blog discusses reactions to Holder’s new guidelines, which are described as providing more flexibility to prosecutors not to argue for mandatory minimum sentences. Of note for this blog’s purposes, Holder’s memo reiterates DOJ’s practice of considering a defendant’s cooperation during the initial charging decision. As the memo states: “In all cases, the charges should fairly represent the defendant’s criminal conduct, and due consideration should be given to the defendant’s substantial assistance in an investigation or prosecution.” As I’ve argued elsewhere, this practice of charge reduction for cooperation is central to the pervasiveness and secrecy of the snitching process: a cooperating suspect will be charged differently, or perhaps not at all, in ways that may leave no paper trail. The U.S. Sentencing Commission keeps track of cooperation departures at sentencing, but charging decisions take place long before a defendant ever comes before a judge to be sentenced.
One consequence of this practice is that cooperation has become a large source of sentencing disparity, the very problem the Sentencing Guidelines were designed to alleviate. For example, an article in the June edition of Justice Quarterly concludes that substantial assistance downward departures are a significant source of inter-judge disparity: “the sentencing discounts that similarly situated defendants get for providing substantial assistance vary upon the judge handling the case,” making substantial assistance departure decisions “a wellspring of sentencing disparity.” Amy Anderson & Cassia Spohn, Lawlessness in the Federal Sentencing Process: A Test for Uniformity and Consistency in Sentence Outcomes, 27 Justice Quarterly 362 (2010). An earlier Sentencing Commission study found that prosecutorial offices reward cooperation very differently as well. In other words, the uniformity offered by determinate sentencing schemes–treating similarly situated offenders similarly– does not cure the significant disparities introduced by unregulated cooperation.
Do jurors ignore informant rewards?
One of the central justifications for the use of compensated criminal witnesses is the idea that juries can evaluate informant credibility in ways that lead to fair and reliable outcomes. Specifically, the Supreme Court held that rewarding criminals for testimony is constitutional, relying in part on the procedural protections of discovery, cross-examination, and jury instructions. The idea is that the government can constitutionally reward its witnesses as long as the defense knows about it and the jury is properly instructed.
Recent psychological research throws some doubt on this idea. Dr. Jeff Neuschatz and a number of other psychologists published the following paper: The Effects of Accomplice Witnesses and Jailhouse Informants on Jury Decision Making, Law & Human Behavior 32 (2008): 137-149. They concluded that jurors who were told that a witness was getting a deal (and therefore had an incentive to lie) were just as likely to convict as jurors who didn’t know that the witness was being compensated. Moreover, the bare fact that an informant said there was a confession made the jury more likely to convict. From the article:
First, both college and community samples demonstrated that conviction rates were unaffected by the explicit provision of information indicating that the witness received an incentive to testify. Second, and consistent with the research on confession evidence in the courtroom, the presence of a confession, albeit a secondary confession, had a significant influence on mock juror conviction rates. More specifically, in every witness typeand across both college and community samples, mock jurors convicted significantly more often when there was a secondary confession provided by a cooperating witness than when no such witness had testified….
Even though the witness in the incentive condition had an enormous motivation to fabricate evidence (having been provided a situational incentive to testify), jurors appeared to ignore this information and render verdicts that were not significantly different across the Incentive and No Incentive conditions. The participants may not have recognized or considered the impact that an incentive might have on behavior and/or the willingness to provide accurate and truthful information. Furthermore, participants did not have significantly different ratings of truthfulness or trustworthiness across the Incentive and No Incentive conditions.
This is an important finding. The system assumes that jurors who are told that an informant is getting a deal will be less likely to believe the informant and less likely to convict. This study suggests not only that this isn’t so, but that just having a criminal informant testify to a confession significantly enhances the likelihood of a conviction.
Jury finds police violated victim’s rights by using false “snitch” label
Last week, a federal jury decided that two Los Angeles police officers violated a young woman’s constitutional rights by falsely labeling her a snitch–a label that led to her death–and then failing to protect her. L.A. Times stories here and here. In an effort to get gang member Jose Ledesma to confess to a murder, police told him that Puebla had identified him as the shooter, even forging her signature on a fake photo array, although Puebla never identified Ledesma. At the same time, the jury found that Puebla and her parents also contributed to her death, and awarded no money to the family.
This is an interesting case for a number of reasons. First, the government is rarely held accountable for its use of or failure to protect informants, so the jury’s conclusion that the police violated Puebla’s constitutional rights by using her in the ruse and then failing to protect her could support future cases. Here is a link to the complaint in the case: Puebla v. Los Angeles, Case No. 08-3128. For another example of the trend(?) towards greater protection for informants–particularly young vulnerable ones–see this post on Florida’s new informant legislation. At the same time, the Los Angeles jury apparently believed that Puebla and her family significantly contributed to her danger–finding the family 80% responsible and the police only 20% at fault. While it is unclear from the Times article why the jury came to this conclusion, the public and the criminal system often blame informants for their own injuries or even death, on the theory that they take the risk by becoming informants in the first place. In this case, the government argued that Puebla was killed, not because of the police ruse, but because she testified months later at a hearing in which she said that Ledesma was gang-affiliated.
More on the Spokane convictions
Last month I posted this story about three men convicted of robbery based on the testimony of a jailhouse snitch in Spokane, Washington — “Another wrongful conviction in the making?” Here’s the follow-up story in the Pacific Northwest Inlander — Justice Served? After another inmate confessed that he and the informant had framed Gassman, Statler and Larson, the defense sought a new trial but the court denied the motion. Since then, various players in the Spokane criminal system have been grappling with whether the convictions were accurate. From the article:
Spokane County Prosecuting Attorney Steve Tucker says he’s not very familiar with the facts in the case, besides what he read in The Inlander. And he’s not compelled to look any deeper, he says. “I don’t think you realize how many calls I get like this. It’s not practical. The system is taking care of it,” Tucker says. “The further investigation will come from the appellate attorneys. They’ll look at it.”
Tucker’s assumption that “the system” will take care of the problem of lying informants is misplaced. Once an informant testifies, the appellate process does not permit a court to go back and reevaluate his or her credibility–that task is left to the jury. There are also numerous legal roadblocks to challenging a conviction, even one based on shaky evidence, as evidenced by the fact that the defendants in this very case were not granted a new trial despite the new confession. In other words, informants are easy to use to get convictions, but very hard to challenge after the fact. This structural arrangement is one of the main reasons that criminal informants have become such a significant factor in wrongful convictions.