Introduction


Criminal informants provide important information to the justice system, but they also pose serious risks. We hope this website will help attorneys, journalists, advocates, and families to better understand this vital area of public policy.

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  • WRONGFUL CONVICTIONS

    Criminal informants are famously unreliable. Jailhouse snitch testimony often leads to wrongful conviction. Over 45 percent of all innocent people exonerated from death sentences were wrongfully convicted based on the testimony of a lying criminal informant. This makes snitches the leading cause of wrongful conviction in U.S. capital cases.


  • YOUNG INFORMANTS

    Police sometimes use children as young as 14 as informants. These children may be exposed to drugs, violence, and other criminal activities as they work to get information for their handlers. Some have been killed. California and New Jersey have laws restricting the practice: in other states police have discretion to use juvenile informants.


  • INFORMANT CRIMES

    Some informants are serious criminals who receive leniency for their own crimes. The FBI has been known to use murderers as informants. Many jurisdictions permit drug dealers to continue selling drugs in exchange for cooperation. In 2011, the crimes committed by FBI informants alone totaled over 5,600.


  • URBAN COMMUNITIES PAY THE PRICE

    Informants are a staple of drug enforcement. This means that where drug enforcement is heaviest, informant activity is also heaviest. Because drug arrests occur disproportionately in low-income African American neighborhoods, those residents must live with the crime, violence, and distrust that go with criminal informant use.


  • REFORM

    Many states are rethinking their criminal informant policies. Some have passed laws restricting the use of jailhouse snitch witnesses. Some have created new rules for disclosure and accountability. The U.S. Congress is considering a number of reforms that would improve transparency and safety. In the future, the laws governing criminal informants will likely look very different than they do today.




Resources

  • SNITCHING: Criminal Informants and the Erosion of American Justice
  • U.S. Attorney General's Guidelines on the FBI's Use of Confidential Human Sources
  • Sarah Stillman, The Throwaways, The New Yorker (2012) (article on the use of juvenile informants)

Recent Blog Posts

Saturday, February 4, 2017

The FBI's "immigration relief dangle"

The FBI has long used immigration as both a carrot and stick to induce people to become informants.  See this story from BuzzFeed last year: Welcome to America, Now Spy on Your Friends.  Now the Intercept has published this article: When Informants Are No Longer Useful, the FBI Can Help Deport Them. It includes new information from  the FBI's "Confidential Human Source Police Guide"--its manual for handling informants--which uses the phrase "immigration relief dangle" to describe the dynamic.  FBI agents coordinate with immigration officials to identify and pressure potential informants, and then help ICE locate them for deportation when they are no longer useful.  From the article:

"It’s been clear for a decade that the FBI works with ICE to keep informants in the country. What we didn’t know was that the assistance is often contingent and temporary, and that the FBI actively assists ICE in locating informants who are no longer useful so that they may be deported."

“'This creates a perverse incentive structure, because informants are incentivized to keep themselves valuable,' said [immigration expert and Stanford lecturer Diala] Shamas. 'It will further incentivize them to create investigations when there wouldn’t be one otherwise. In the traditional criminal context, the law enforcement community is conscious of the risk that coercing informants increases the likelihood of getting bad intelligence. But in the counterterrorism and intelligence context, this caution has been thrown out the window.'"

The article is by Trevor Aaronson, author of the Terror Factory: Inside the FBI's Manufactured War on Terrorism.
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