On Sunday, 60 Minutes ran this segment entitled “Young people going undercover in war on drugs.” The story covered several examples that have been in the news, including the recent Buzzfeed investigation into the student informant program at Ole Miss, the death of college student Andrew Sadek in North Dakota, and the death of Rachel Hoffman in Florida. More examples are here. For a thorough look at the ways that young informants are pressured and used, read the New Yorker article The Throwaways.
Archives for December 2015
Call for federal investigation of Orange County
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.”