The jailhouse snitch scandal in Orange County continues to escalate. In November, Dean Erwin Chemerinsky, former California Attorney General John Van de Kamp, and numerous other legal experts (including me), called for a federal investigation. Here is the letter to U.S. Attorney General Lynch. A month earlier, the New York Times Editorial Board identified the “blatant and systemic misconduct in the Orange County District Attorney’s Office” and also called for a federal investigation. Meanwhile, the OC Register published this special report entitled “How jailhouse informants and the ‘snitch tank’ put Orange County justice system in turmoil.”
Jailhouse Informants
9th Circuit panel intervenes in prosecutorial misconduct
During appellate argument, a Ninth Circuit panel of federal judges lambasted the California Attorney General’s office for failing to discipline a prosecutor who lied about rewarding a jailhouse snitch. Los Angeles Times story and video of argument (beginning at 16:00 minutes) here. The panel, which included Judges Kozinski, Wardlaw and Fletcher, instructed the government attorney to go back to his office and tell the Attorney General to act on the matter.
Orange County jailhouse informant scandal goes national
National attention is finally turning to the Orange County fiasco. The judge has kicked the entire District Attorney’s Office off the case, largely because so many prosecutors and sheriffs lied under oath to protect their secret records and unconstitutional practices. Dean Erwin Chemerinsky has called for an independent inquiry and major reforms; Al Jazeera has revealed secret recordings of the informant’s negotiation with sheriffs; Slate’s Dahlia Lithwick says the scandal “shows eerie parallels” to other jailhouse informant debacles. Speaking to Slate, Laura Fernandez at Yale Law School concludes that the “massive cover up by both law enforcement and prosecutors…has effectively turned the criminal justice system on its head.”
Hopefully all this attention will finally persuade lawmakers that jailhouse informants are a public policy worth regulating properly at the front end, instead of waiting for some intrepid defense attorney or journalist to uncover a disaster. For jurisdictions that have recently concluded as much, see this post.
Detroit jailhouse snitch ring
Add Detroit to the list of known jailhouse informant scandals. This story–Ring of Snitches: How Detroit Police Slapped False Murder Convictions on Young Black Men–details how during the 1990s, numerous informants obtained “lenient sentences as well as food, drugs, sex and special privileges from detectives in the Detroit Police Department’s homicide division in return for making statements against dozens of prisoners eventually convicted of murder.” The story is eerily reminiscent of the Los Angeles debacle, as well the ongoing scandal in Orange County.
Texas considers banning informant testimony in capital cases
Several states are considering new legislation to regulate informant use. In Texas, HB 564 would ban the use of compensated criminal witnesses in death penalty cases altogether. The bill provides that the “testimony of an informant or of an alleged accomplice of the defendant is not admissible if the testimony is given in exchange for a grant or promise by the attorney representing the state or by another of immunity from prosecution, reduction of sentence, or any other form of leniency or special treatment.” Full story at The Intercept here. Radley Balko at the Washington Post calls the bill a “significant first step” in recognizing the inherent unreliability of informants. As Balko, who has written about informant debacles before, puts it:
“The whole concept of jailhouse informants defies credulity. The very idea that people regularly confess to crimes that could put them in prison for decades or possibly even get them executed to someone they just met in a jail cell and have known for all of a few hours is and has always been preposterous. Not to mention the fact that these are people whose word prosecutors wouldn’t trust under just about any other circumstance.”
In North Carolina, HB 700–which did not pass–would have created comprehensive regulation of jailhouse informants, including corroboration requirements, enhanced discovery, jury instructions, and data collection. Story here. An interesting feature of this bill was that it would have created a “rebuttable presumption of inadmissibility,” placing the burden on the government to show that these risky witnesses should nevertheless be permitted to testify.