Snitching

Criminal Informant Law, Policy, and Research

Police

Recordings of police who helped informants sell drugs

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Eye-popping series of articles on whistleblowing Officer Murashea Bovell. Bovell recorded fellow Officer John Campo who admitted that he helped an informant continue to sell drugs in exchange for help arresting low-level buyers. This is exactly backwards: protecting big fish dealers who turn in their little fish users.  From the article: 


    “Campo’s claim that he personally safeguarded the drug dealer’s bundle of crack was made in one of several phone calls secretly recorded by Bovell between 2017 and this year. In that and another recording, Campo claimed that members of the department’s narcotics unit allowed favored drug dealers to sell with impunity, get deliveries, and control territory. In exchange, he said, the dealers, serving as confidential informants, gave them information leading to the arrests of their own low-level clients.”

This is also an example of how informant use involves tolerating and perpetuating all sorts of other crime, including domestic violence.  According to the article, the informant who was permitted to continue dealing drugs “has racked up a string of convictions for choking, domestic violence, assault, contempt, and harassment, earning him several stints in prison and prompting courts to issue protection orders.”  Again from the article:

    “Lawrence Mottola, a former Brooklyn prosecutor, said police should be very cautious about using informants involved in domestic violence. ‘It’s natural to feel that you’re emboldened by this because you have the backing of the police and they’re going to help you if you get stuck in a situation,’ he said. ‘It’s potentially very dangerous for everyone in that household or in that relationship. And domestic violence cases are already extremely dangerous.'”

How police turn teens into informants

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Check out this interview with Nick Taiber, former City Council member in Cedar Falls, Iowa, who became an drug informant when he was a teenager, and Luke Hunt, former FBI agent and now professor.  Taiber describes how police pressured him at age 17 to become an informant after a car accident.  Hunt says “What’s most troubling to me is a very common scenario in which the police compel an informant to do certain operational acts because they have a tremendous amount of power and leverage over the person.” More here from Slate: How Police Turn Teens Into Informants. 

The past few years have seen new attention to the youth informant phenomenon.  Sarah Stillman’s tour-de-force article The Throwaways came out in the New Yorker in 2012; since then there have been numerous media stories regarding college students and other young people pressured into become informants, often with terrible consequences for them and their families.

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.

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.

Georgia prison official loses his job for objecting to informant program

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The Atlanta Journal-Constitution reports that Georgia prison captain Sherman Maine was fired when he objected to a secret, off-the-books informant program being run in high security prisons in which informants were given cell phones.  From the story:

“Maine said the secrecy of the program makes it impossible to know if the reward is worth the risk. ‘Now every stabbing becomes suspect,’ said Maine, 45. ‘We won’t know who’s an informant or not. They’re going to get someone killed, if they haven’t already.’ . . .  Maine said [the program] reveals a lack of respect for human life while exposing the state to great liability. ‘They de-value human life to the point that it’s ridiculous,’ he said. ‘The state kept referring to (informants) as tools. They’re not tools, they’re people, and we have an obligation to protect them.’”

Maine is suing the Department of Corrections for violations of the Georgia Whistleblower Act.