Snitching

Criminal Informant Law, Policy, and Research

Prosecutors

Paying jailhouse snitches with conjugal visits

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A Miami prosecutor has resigned from a death penalty case after Judge Andrea Ricker Wolfson found evidence of various types of “witness testimony manipulation” and “severe recklessness” by prosecutors stretching back decades. AP story here: Veteran Miami prosecutor quits after judge’s rebuke over conjugal visits for jailhouse informants, and ABA Journal story here.

As I have written many times, there are almost no limits on the kinds of rewards that the government can offer an informant in exchange for information. Typically it is the failure to disclose the benefits, not the propriety of offering the benefits themselves, that constitutes prosecutorial misconduct.

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.”

Orange County snitch scandal still isn’t over

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It began back in 2012, when public defender Scott Sanders started uncovering unconstitutional informant use in the Orange County jail and widespread law enforcement practices designed to cover them up. Dozens of cases were compromised, including homicide cases, due to prosecutorial misconduct. The US Department of Justice conducted a six-year investigation. Now Sanders has filed a new motion detailing many more cases that may have been compromised. From the LAist:

“On top of the cases already impacted by the snitch scandal’s long reach, Sanders outlined dozens more cases in a recent court filing that could be revisited because of new evidence of potential misconduct. That misconduct, Sanders alleges, was carried out by O.C. law enforcement officers and a former top prosecutor who is now a superior court judge.”

For years, Sanders and the Orange County Public Defender office have been the prime drivers for uncovering informant misuse and official nondisclosure. As Maurice Possley of the National Registry of Exonerations points out, “we don’t really know how common it is for law enforcement officials and prosecutors to withhold evidence because it’s a ‘”‘hidden crime.'”

Empirical study on federal drug cooperation

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Interesting new law review article on how federal defense attorneys (mostly CJA panel attorneys) perceive cooperation rates and opportunities for their (mostly) drug clients: Why Criminal Defendants Cooperate: The Defense Attorney’s Perspective. The authors surveyed defense counsel in three large federal districts (SDNY, EDPA, EDVA) and found, unsurprisingly, that cooperation is largely driven by the promise of sentencing benefits — precisely what federal mandatory minimums and the US Sentencing Guidelines are designed to do.

Perhaps more surprisingly, when the authors asked defense attorneys whether “cooperation agreements are the product of a fair process,” on a scale from 1 (completely disagree) to 9 (completely agree), the “average rating [was] 3.17. Such a low average indicates that federal defense attorneys who participated in this study felt that cooperation agreements are not the product of a fair process.” Even former prosecutors in the sample only gave the process 4 out of 9 for fairness. Recall that this study was performed in one of the most regulated, transparent, and lawyered arenas of cooperation: by hypothesis all the defendants in these cases were represented by experienced counsel who negotiated formal cooperation deals on their behalf in the relatively well-resourced elite space of the federal judiciary. Just imagine how much more unfair the cooperation process gets where police and prosecutors pressure vulnerable, unrepresented suspects to cooperate informally. For some particularly egregious examples, see this prior post: How police turn teens into informants.

New Jersey AG issues jailhouse informant directive

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The New Jersey Attorney General issued Directive 2020-11 which requires all state prosecutors to seek supervisory approval before using jailhouse informants. That approval process requires, among other things, the collection of comprehensive information regarding the proposed informant witness. Supervisors must satisfy themselves that prosecutors have met their discovery obligations, and that “there is independent, credible evidence corroborating the informant’s testimony.”