Snitching

Criminal Informant Law, Policy, and Research

Innocence

Refusing to snitch

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The Marshall Project has published this remarkable story about George Hall who refused to serve as a jailhouse informant against David Wood. David Wood is on death row and is scheduled to be executed next month in Texas.

Hall, Wood, and two other men were all incarcerated together back in 1990. According to Hall, Hall and the two other men were offered deals by Texas law enforcement to testify falsely against Wood. Hall refused; the other men agreed and helped convict Wood. From the story:

“As Hall tells it, several El Paso detectives took the three men, without handcuffs, to a hamburger joint and a police station, seating them in a room with photographs of the victims, a large coffee pot, cigarettes and snacks. They handed the men case files with crime scene photos and interview notes with other witnesses, Hall said. “David Wood is our suspect,” he recalls the detectives saying. “It’d be best if you tell us something, because we can’t let this guy walk.” Plus, there was reward money for people who helped them.”

Stories like Hall’s are rare for a number of reasons. The government only rewards inculpatory evidence — evidence that builds the state’s cases and makes defendants look guilty — not evidence that might help exonerate a defendant. Conversely, defendants can’t offer leniency at all, and offering money or a reward looks like witness tampering. Which means that all the incentives run in one direction, towards snitching for the prosecution and away from contradicting the government’s story. When someone like Hall refuses to snitch, moreover, they will not be called as a witness by the government, which means the defense might never learn about them. And coming forward like Hall did can be risky for people facing their own criminal cases: they run the risk of law enforcement disfavor or even retaliation. (This reality sits in considerable tension with the Second Circuit’s holding that prisoners have a First Amendment right against being forced to act as an informant.)

For all these kinds of reasons, when people refuse to snitch, we are unlikely to learn about it, which makes this particular story even more revealing. Story here: He Refused to Become a Jailhouse Snitch. Can He Stop David Wood’s Execution?

Mass. Supreme Court orders comprehensive jury instructions for all jailhouse informants

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The Supreme Judicial Court (SJC) issued an opinion today requiring that juries be given comprehensive, detailed, cautionary instructions whenever the government calls an incarcerated informant as a witness, regardless of whether the informant is testifying pursuant to a cooperation deal. The Massachusetts high court also affirmed the general admissibility of defense expert testimony at trial “discussing the research regarding the unreliability of incarcerated informant testimony.” The SJC is following in the footsteps of Connecticut which has long required special cautionary jury instructions regarding informant testimony, and whose Supreme Court decided in State v. Leniart (2020) that defense expert testimony regarding informants is admissible. Here is a link to the SJC decision Commonwealth v. Lacrosse. Some excerpts from the SJC opinion:

We begin by acknowledging that the defendant raises legitimate concerns about the reliability of the testimony of incarcerated informants. . . . [W]e are persuaded that a more comprehensive and specific instruction directed at all incarcerated informant testimony, regardless of whether the incarcerated informant is testifying pursuant to a cooperation agreement, would be beneficial in future cases. . . .

Indeed, we have [] modified the Connecticut instruction to direct juries to consider how incarcerated informants may have accessed the information apart from a confession by the defendant, such as through access to the defendant’s discovery materials or media accounts of the crime.

Defense counsel may also, of course, present expert witness testimony discussing the research regarding the unreliability of incarcerated informant testimony so long as the requirements of Daubert-Lanigan are satisfied for such testimony. See State v. Leniart, 333 Conn. 88, 144 (2019) (expert testimony on “the general characteristics of the marketplace for criminal informant testimony and the academic research indicating that unreliable informant testimony contributes to many wrongful convictions” admissible so long as it satisfies other requirements for expert testimony).

For a more detailed explanation of why juries need expert help assessing jailhouse informants, see this explainer in The Appeal.

Another jailhouse snitch ring in Texas

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This deep and detailed series of articles from The Intercept uncovers a prosecutor’s heavy reliance on a snitch ring in the federal prison in Beaumont, Texas, and the discredited convictions that it produced. In the capital murder case against Ronald Prible, for example, a federal judge found that the prosecutor, Kelly Siegler, suppressed exculpatory evidence about the jailhouse informant whose testimony led to Prible’s conviction. Siegler is the television star of the true crime show “Cold Justice.” All three Intercept articles here: The Prosecutor and the Snitch Ring.

The Beaumont prison snitch ring has been in the news before. Ten years ago, Ann Colomb and her four sons were wrongfully convicted of federal drug charges based on dozens of lying Beaumont informants (here’s the original story from Radley Balko in Reason Magazine). Federal Judge Tucker Melancon who presided over the Colomb case complained specifically about Federal Rule 35 which permits federal prisoners to get sentence reductions in exchange for information. (This is the same rule that Siegler used in the Prible case to incentivize her informant, Michael Beckcom, to testify.) As Judge Melancon put it, “Everyone in the federal prisons knows what’s going on . . . . [T]hey realize they can tell the government things that happened years ago—true or not—and get time off their sentences.” And he warned that “[w]e potentially have a huge problem with this network in the federal prison system.”

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.