Snitching

Criminal Informant Law, Policy, and Research

Jailhouse Informants

Jailhouse snitch exoneration in Detroit

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Ramon Ward was wrongfully convicted of murder in 1994 based on the testimony of two jailhouse informants and sentenced to life in prison. Twenty-five years later, the Conviction Integrity Unit of the Wayne County Prosecutor’s Office in Detroit moved to vacate his conviction and he was released in February of this year.  Story from The New Republic here: He Was Wrongly Imprisoned for 25 Years. It Wasn’t DNA Evidence That Got Him Out.

Of particular note, Ward’s wrongful conviction was secured in part because Detroit police went around the prosecutor’s office to obtain benefits for their informants directly from the judge.  As one prosecutor actually observed during Ward’s trial, “promises of leniency are made to these snitches without approval—or prior knowledge—which exceeds police authority and violates our policies.” That same prosecutor worried about wrongful conviction: “I have been told,” he wrote, “that snitches do lie about overhearing confessions and fabricate admissions in order to obtain police favors or obtain the deals they promised.” 

Ward was not alone: his wrongful conviction was part of a pattern of Detroit police practices in the 1990’s.

Connecticut Supreme Court issues decision on informant experts

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The Connecticut Supreme Court has decided that informant experts like myself are admissible when they can provide specialized information to jurors about informant unreliability, namely, information that jurors would not otherwise know based on common sense or from the popular culture or general media.  The Supreme Court upheld the exclusion of my testimony in this particular case, but noted that such testimony is not per se inadmissible, and it imagined other scenarios in which expert testimony might be admitted. The 2019 case, State v. Leniart, overturned this 2016 decision, in which the Connecticut Court of Appeals held that the trial judge made a mistake in preventing me from testifying before the jury.

I explain what the Leniart decision means in more detail in this piece for The Appeal: Why Juries Need Expert Help Assessing Jailhouse Informants.  In particular, I explain why jurors are unlikely to understand the full scope of informant practices, fabrications, and motivations to lie, and therefore would be helped by hearing expert testimony:

“Informants are highly motivated to give persuasive, believable testimony in exchange for their own freedom. They can also receive money, drugs, sex, food, and phone privileges when they cooperate with jail officials. Some scour the newspapers, pay other inmates for information, or get family members to pull court records so that they can come up with incriminating testimony against their cellmates. Some jurors may already know about these sorts of practices; many will not.”

Eye-opening series on jailhouse informants in ProPublica/NYT

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Pamela Colloff has written this extraordinary investigative series into the government’s use of jailhouse informants. She zeroes in on Paul Skalnik, a prolific and stunningly unreliable informant who escaped punishment for many of his own crimes, including child molestation.  The first piece is entitled How This Con Man’s Wild Testimony Sent Dozens to Jail, and 4 to Death Row, and was jointly published by ProPublica and the New York Times Magazine. Among the many people Skalnik sent to jail is James Dailey whom many believe to be innocent: Dailey is currently on death row.  From the article:

   “In jail, it is widely understood that helping prosecutors and the police can earn extraordinary benefits, from reduced sentences to dismissed charges. By the time Dailey’s trial began the following summer in Clearwater, in June 1987, no fewer than three inmates had come forward claiming to have heard Dailey confess to the killing. The first two worked in the jail’s law library, where they professed to have heard Dailey say about the murder, “I’m the one that did it.” They also told the jury of ferrying several handwritten notes between Dailey and Pearcy; in the letters shown to the jury, Dailey appeared eager to appease his co-defendant, whom prosecutors planned to put on the stand. But the two jailhouse informants were eclipsed by a third inmate, who had contacted Halliday to say that he had some information. He told a much more damning story — one that placed Dailey at the scene of the crime and put the knife in his hand. It was exactly what prosecutors needed.  That witness was Paul Skalnik, a familiar figure around the Pinellas County Courthouse. He had appeared before the court numerous times as a jailhouse informant and was skilled at providing the sort of incendiary details that brought a defendant’s guilt into sudden, terrible focus.”

Colloff writes more about the Dailey case here: A Liar Put Him on Death Row. His Co-Defendant Could Help Set Him Free. Why Won’t He?

Former police chief and prosecutor on the dangers of snitching in USA Today

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Here is an important op-ed in USA Today from Miriam Krinsky and Ronal Serpas: “Stop letting prosecutors get away with threatening murder.” They chronicle the misuse of informants by law enforcment in Orange County and across the country.  About Orange Country, they write:

“Prosecutors used informants to do what would have been illegal for them to do directly — question individuals awaiting trial without their lawyer present and, even worse, use threats of murder and violence to coerce confessions. . . . These practices fly in the face of the fundamental duty of prosecutors: to seek truth and pursue justice.”

Krinsky is a former federal prosecutor and now the Executive Director of Fair and Just Prosecution.  Serpas is former Chief of Police for New Orleans and now Professor of Criminology at Loyola University.

Connecticut Adopts Nation’s First Statewide System to Track Jailhouse Witnesses

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This month Connecticut’s governor signed a new law that will establish the first statewide tracking system for jailhouse witness testimony. This measure will help improve transparency and weed out false statements from inmates who expect leniency or other benefits for their cooperation.

Each prosecutor’s office in the state will be required to maintain a record of the substance and use of jailhouse witness testimony and any benefits that have been or may be provided. The Governor’s Office of Policy and Management will collect the data from every office so that prosecutors can see if a potential jailhouse witness offered similar testimony in other jurisdictions and whether that testimony was reliable. If the prosecutor introduces the statements, previous jailhouse witness activity would be disclosed to the defense.

In addition, SB 1098 requires:

  • Prompt disclosures of jailhouse witness evidence: Within 45 days of the defense filing a request, the prosecution must disclose specific evidence on jailhouse witnesses including: benefits offered for their testimony, their criminal history and other cases in which they acted as jailhouse witnesses.
  • Pre-trial hearings: For rape and murder cases, judges must hold a hearing to screen out unreliable jailhouse witness testimony before it is heard by the jury.
Learn more about the new law in this article.

posted by Michelle Feldman