Snitching

Criminal Informant Law, Policy, and Research

News Stories

Infamous “fake-drug scandal” informant re-convicted in Dallas

by

In 2001 in Dallas, Channel 8 TV and the Dallas Morning News revealed how a ring of police and their paid narcotics informants planted fake drugs (gypsum) on innocent Latino immigrants in order to inflate department drug bust statistics. Many of those innocent victims were deported before the scam was discovered. Now the main informant in that ring–Enrique Martinez Alonso–has been convicted again, this time for counterfeiting. See this post from GritsforBreakfast for an overview; here’s the story from the Dallas News. This story is a classic example of how snitches can leverage cooperation to avoid punishment for ongoing serious crimes. Not only did the six informants led by Alonso earn $440,000 for their roles in the fake drug scandal, but Alonso’s subsequent criminal sentences were drastically reduced because of his cooperation with authorities–he served five years before being deported in 2007, while his brother received a 20-year sentence. As Grits points out:

Enrique was always portrayed by the media and officialdom as the main informant working with Delapaz (and the seven other officers who allegedly faked field tests claiming Alonso’s drugs were real), so it’s somewhat shocking to learn he received a sentence only 25% of his brother’s. That’s a steep discount for his second stint as an informant – this time against his co-conspirators and police “handlers.” This fellow keeps being compensated for snitching on others – by Dallas police, by the feds – even when he appears to be at the center of the criminal activity in question.

Life imitating art imitating life…

by

A vice president of a multimillion dollar company turns informant to avoid liability, surreptitiously taping his high-level colleagues who are eventually charged with corporate fraud. If this sounds like the plot of the movie “The Informant” (reviewed here), it is. But it is also the plot of this news story about the theft of $2 million worth of fuel from the Mexican oil company Petroleos Mexicanos: “Ex-Bush aide tied to stolen oil case.” Here’s an excerpt:

Josh Crescenzi of Houston, former vice president for Continental Fuels of San Antonio, has been cooperating with agents of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement for several months, helping them secretly record conversations that have resulted in the conviction of a Houston oil industry executive, another one from San Antonio and the president of a small oil and gas company in Edinburg.

Stories like this (and this) suggest that the use of active informants in white collar investigations, i.e. using cooperating suspects to actively snare high-level corporate offenders in ongoing wrongdoing, is on the rise, although since the whole arena is shrouded in secrecy it’s hard to say if the practice is now more prevalent or we are just hearing more about it. In any event, because white collar informants and defendants are better resourced and represented than your typical street or drug snitch, we should expect such cases to improve the overall visibility and accountability of informant practices. As sociology professor Gary Marx wrote 20 years ago in his landmark book “Undercover: Police Surveillance in America”:

When lower-status drug dealers and users or prostitutes were the main targets of covert operations, the tactic tended to be ignored, but when congressmen and business executives who can afford the best legal counsel became targets, congressional inquiries and editorials urging caution appeared.

“ICE agents mishandle informants”

by

The Associated Press reports that the federal Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agency is having the same sorts of informant problems that its FBI and DEA counterparts have long struggled against. Here’s an excerpt from the story:

One immigration agent was accused of running an Internet pornography business and enjoying an improper relationship with an informant. Another let an informant smuggle in a group of illegal immigrants. And in a third case, an agent was investigated for soliciting sex from a witness in a marriage fraud case.

These troubling misdeeds are a sampling of misconduct by federal Immigration and Customs Enforcement personnel as the agency seeks to carve out a bigger role in the deadly border war against Mexican drug gangs.

According to documents obtained by The Associated Press under the Freedom of Information Act, ICE agents have blundered badly in their dealings with informants and other sources, covering up crimes and even interfering in a police investigation into whether one informant killed another.

I blogged about this last incident a couple of months ago–see Informants Killing Informants. Now it appears that ICE deliberately steered El Paso police in the wrong direction to protect their murderous source. This behavior is reminiscent of the FBI’s cover-ups of mafia informant murders and other crimes in the 1980s and 90s. Indeed, the official toleration and facilitation of crime is the core compromise at the heart of snitching, and suggests that insofar as ICE is making informants the centerpiece of its border strategy, its problems in this arena are only just beginning.

Huffington Post on jailhouse snitches and exonerations

by

Today’s Huffington Post reports on the recent death row exonerations of Yancy Douglas and Paris Powell–both men were convicted based solely on in-custody or “jailhouse” snitch testimony. The post was written by John Terzano, president of the Washington D.C.-based Justice Project, which has produced a report on jailhouse snitch use and policy recommendations. Here’s an excerpt from the post:

These exonerations highlight the power prosecutors have in securing convictions by utilizing in-custody informant testimony, even when no physical evidence links a defendant to the crime. Testimony by in-custody informants or “jailhouse snitches” as they are often referred, is a leading cause of wrongful convictions. With little to lose, jailhouse snitches have great incentives to provide false information to prosecutors in exchange for leniency or other forms of compensation. Deals that are made between prosecutors and jailhouse snitches do not often come to light when a jury has to weigh the evidence is a case.

British “stop snitching” rap song on YouTube leads to convictions

by

Two british rappers have been convicted of obstructing justice for putting an anti-snitching rap song on YouTube. Story here. The two men had been arrested but not prosecuted in connection with a shooting murder last year. While the defendants claimed the song was just gangsta rap, the government argued that “the video had but one purpose–to threaten any witness to this incident to frighten them to such an extent that they would refuse to cooperate with the police.”

The U.S. has First Amendment protections for art and speech that the U.K. lacks, which would make it significantly more difficult to prosecute such cases. Here, the government would have a heavy burden to show that the rap song represented a true threat aimed at a particular person and not a more general expression of anti-snitch sentiment. Although I am unaware of any such prosecutions to date, it is only a matter of time. A recent note in the Columbia Journal of Law & the Arts entitled “Can’t Stop Snitchin’: Criminalizing Threats Made in ‘Stop Snitching’ Media under the True Threats Exception to the First Amendment,” addresses the legal standard. The piece argues that with sufficient specificity, some “stop snitching” songs might lose their First Amendment protection and qualify as threats, although it would be rare. As author Jacob Honigman puts it:

It might be theoretically possible–by recording a song that references a particular person or crime in a manner sufficiently serious enough to indicate that the artist actually intends to commit an act of violence, or by performing a song threatening snitches in front of a courthouse as a trial is scheduled to begin–for a hip-hop artist to cross the true threat line. But I am not aware of any such instance. This, combined with the tradition of affording all forms of music, including rap, full First Amendment protection, make it extremely unlikely that such a statement could be criminalized.

More generally, the First Amendment has not prevented rap lyrics from being used against their authors as criminal evidence. Rap songs have been admitted as evidence to show a defendant’s intent or knowledge or as confessions of past criminal acts. Law Professor Andrea Dennis wrote an article on the phenomenon entitled “Poetic (In)Justice? Rap Music Lyrics as Art, Life, and Criminal Evidence,” in which she argues that courts misapprehend the artistic significance of rap lyrics when they treat them as simple admissions of guilt or factual descriptions of a rapper’s life.