On Friday, a Denver jury convicted Willie Clark in the killing of Denver Bronco Darrent Williams during a drive-by shooting. Much of the case, although not all, was based on the testimony of heavily rewarded criminal informants. Stories here and here. One witness in particular, Daniel "Ponytail" Harris, admitted to being in the car from which the bullets came, and testified that he saw Clark, and only Clark, shoot out the window at the limousine in which Williams was riding. Harris was facing a life sentence for an unrelated federal drug charge, but in exchange for his testimony, he will see that sentence cut down to five years. He will also avoid being prosecuted for the shooting himself. Another witness, gang member Vernone Edwards, will get a decade shaved off his crack-cocaine trafficking sentence. This sort of heavily compensated, self-serving testimony is one of the prime reasons that informant testimony has become such a problematic source of error. Three alternate and released jurors who spoke to reporters after the case was over said they did not believe Harris. One of the lead prosecutors in Harris's drug case candidly explained that prosecutors can only do their best to determine whether such witnesses are telling the truth.

It used to be that informant unreliability issues were litigated, if at all, on habeas, or by volunteer attorneys at innocence projects long after the case was over. Those days are coming to an end. With heightened public and media awareness of the problem, I predict that we will see more cases in which the problem of informant reliability is addressed early on in the process, at trial or on appeal, and not, as so often has happened in the past, as an afterthought or not at all.

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While we may never know what actually happened between DEA Agent Lee Lucas and his informant Jerrell Bray--a hazardous partnership that rocked Cleveland for the last few years-- their story reveals the many dangers that arise when law enforcement hitches its wagon to criminal snitches. In 2007, the Cleveland Plain Dealer began extensive reporting on allegations that Bray, a convicted killer and drug dealer, was using his relationship to the DEA to frame rivals and innocent people and that Agent Lucas had lied to make cases. Eventually, over a dozen convictions were reversed, including those of people who pleaded guilty. Story here. Bray was convicted of perjury and is currently serving 14 years; Agent Lucas was prosecuted for perjury and obstruction of justice. Last month, a jury acquitted Agent Lucas of all 18 charges. Story here. Law enforcement agents are rarely prosecuted for relying on bad informants, so the Plain Dealer's coverage offers a rare glimpse into the ways that an informant can shape--or deform--official decisions.

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Here's part 3 of the NPR series on informants--this one focuses on how ICE sometimes uses non-citizens as informants and then lets them be deported once they are no longer useful: Retired Drug Informant Says He Was Burned (NPR), and Informants can greatly aid US authories but still face deportation (LA Times). Deportation poses special dangers to informants, who may be killed upon returning to their home countries, in much the same way that domestic informants face special dangers in local jails and prisons or even on the streets. The government is under little legal obligation to protect its sources. For example, after he gave his FBI handler a tip, Charles Shuler was shot and paralyzed because the FBI blew his cover. A court dismissed Shuler's lawsuit, ruling that the FBI did not owe him protection. Stories like these reflect the more general phenomenon that informants who lack counsel, education, or other resources are often vulnerable to official exploitation.

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NPR is running a three-part series on the federal informant connected to the so-called House of Death murders that occurred six years ago in Ciudad Juarez, Mexico: The Case of a Confidential Informant Gone Wrong. For additional coverage of this story, see this 2007 Dallas Observer feature entitled House of Death. The informant, who was known as "Lalo" to his handlers, was working for the federal Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency (ICE) even as he participated in drug-cartel-ordered executions. Top ICE officials deny knowledge of the murders and claim that "rogue agents" failed to follow guidelines, while Lalo's handler, Agent Raul Bencomo, says his supervisors knew about the killings. According to NPR, ICE withheld information about Lalo's role in the murders from the DEA and from Mexican officials. Former DEA Special Agent Phil Jordan describes the Lalo case as a disaster in which every rule was broken.

Even if the man was John Gotti in his prime, you do not allow an informant to run the investigation; you do not let the informant commit felonies, to commit murder. In my mind, he was given a license to kill.

Lalo has been in federal custody for five years. Now that the case against Lalo's target is over, ICE is trying to deport him back to Mexico.

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The Los Angeles Times reports that the SEC wants to emulate the IRS's bounty program for rewarding criminal informants: SEC chief wants to catch investment scammers in the act. I posted about the IRS program here: IRS expands use of informants. This trend towards courting criminal informants in white collar investigations, as opposed to innocent whistleblowers, is part of a larger systemic culture in which guilt has become completely negotiable. The IRS, for example, used to balk at rewarding offending informants who actually participated in the wrongdoing, but its new rules make it easier to do. To be sure, there are immense informational benefits to using offenders as snitches--they tend to have more information than innocent bystanders. But it squarely raises one of the central compromises that has dogged criminal snitching in drug and mafia investigations, which is that the process can forgive and even reward serious wrongdoers. The IRS and SEC should think carefully about the extent to which they are willing to emulate the world of drug enforcement, in which guilt and punishment have become percevied as commodities, in which cooperation can become a kind of get-out-of-jail-free card, and in which law enforcement is too often seen as tolerating crime and even violence from its informants in order to secure information.

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Snitching is featured this week over on the Page 99 Test . The blog is driven by the writer Ford Madox Ford's adage: "Open the book to page ninety-nine and read, and the quality of the whole will be revealed to you." Page 99 of Snitching reads as follows:

Today's informant culture goes beyond the inquiry in any specific case about whether it might be dangerous to reveal the name of an informant or whether a particular investigation might be compromised by such revelations. Rather, the system is moving towards wholesale policies of keeping cases, dockets, and practices secret. Today, the potential threat to some witnesses is now seen by courts as a reason to overcome the presumption of openness for all criminal records.

In these ways, the practice of using informants undermines public transparency throughout the criminal system. By resolving liability in secret, it insulates investigative and prosecutorial techniques from judicial and legislative scrutiny. This reduced public access affects numerous other constituencies as well, making it more difficult for the press, crime victims, families, and policy analysts to obtain information about the workings of the justice system or about specific criminal cases. Informant use has thus become a powerful and destructive informational policy in its own right, reducing public transparency and obscuring the real impact of criminal practices on individuals, communities, and other institutions.

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Last week I did the Patt Morrison Show on KPCC (you can listen here), with prize-winning former L.A.Times investigative reporter Ted Rohrlich. Over the years he's done some great stories on informants. For example, in Trading Lies for Freedom, Rohrlich reported on several professional jailhouse snitches in the Los Angeles County jail system, including the now-infamous Leslie Vernon White of 60 Minutes fame. The piece describes the "variety of techniques" used by snitches to fabricate confessions:

To gather the information that will make a confession appear plausible, informants have used a variety of techniques, ranging from the artful to the crude. Some informants, for example, have carefully maintained files of newspaper and magazine articles on sensational criminal cases, or have stolen legal documents from the cells of other inmates. They have conned fellow prisoners, even those who have insisted on their innocence, into giving up key details of the cases against them. Some have pretended to be jailhouse lawyers offering free advice. Others merely have asked why someone is in jail, then transformed the most sincere protestations of innocence into admissions of guilt. Informants have purchased information from other informants for money, candy or cigarettes. Some informants have testified that they received inside information from police.

In Authorities Go Fishing for Jailhouse Confessions, Rohrlich described how some detectives purposefully placed suspects in the LA jail "snitch tank," hoping that the resident informants would come up with incriminating confessions. The story begins as follows:

The homicide detective thought he knew the identity of a murderer but couldn't prove it. To make his case, he wanted a confession. But his suspect wouldn't talk. Los Angeles Police Detective Philip Sowers did what one prosecutor said a lot of detectives do. He turned to the informant tank at Los Angeles County Jail for help. Sowers arranged for jailers to place his suspect, who was not an informant, in the special section of the jail reserved for informants -- inmates who habitually tell police that other inmates have confessed to murders or other serious crimes. Within days, Sowers had reports from four informants, known to detectives as "friendlies," that his suspect had confessed.

Joseph Jones had quite a choice. He could plead guilty to selling drugs he had not sold and serve eight years in prison. Or he could risk being convicted at trial and, as a three-time loser, be sentenced to life. Ex-felon Miguel Hernandez was offered a similarly absurd "break." He could give up 16 months of his life by pleading guilty to possessing a weapon he had never had. Or he could demand a trial and face the possibility of four or more years in prison. In offering criminal defendants these kinds of Hobson's choices, prosecutors and judges did not set out to induce innocent men to plead guilty--although that is what they did. The prosecutors and judges merely accepted the word of Los Angeles police that the men were guilty.

Each of these articles is important in its own right, shedding light on specific criminal justice failures. They also remind us that journalism plays a crucial role in maintaining the accountability of a criminal process that rarely volunteers information about its own mistakes.

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The New Jersey Record reports that ultra-right-wing radio host/blogger Hal Turner worked for over five years for the FBI. Turner was tried last month for threatening three federal appellate judges in Chicago: Judges Posner, Easterbrook, and Bauer. Turner's case ended in a mistrial and he is scheduled to be retried in March. According to the Record, Turner was paid and coached by the FBI while he broadcast neo-Nazi and white supremacy views over the radio and internet:

As Turner took to his radio show and blog to say that those who opposed his extremist views deserve to die, he received thousands of dollars from the FBI to report on such groups as the Aryan Nations and the white supremacist National Alliance, and even a member of the Blue Eyed Devils skinhead punk band. Later, he was sent undercover to Brazil where he reported a plot to send non-military supplies to anti-American Iraqi resistance fighters. Sometimes he signed "Valhalla" on his FBI payment receipts instead of his own name.
His dual life of shock jock and informant offers a window into the murky realm of domestic intelligence in the years after the Sept. 11 terror attacks — in particular, the difficult choices for the FBI in penetrating controversial fringe groups with equally controversial informants. In interviews, he said the FBI coached him to make racist, anti-Semitic and other threatening statements and now he feels double-crossed by the bureau after his arrest. The documents reviewed by The Record, however, show repeated instances of federal agents admonishing Turner for his extremism.

Turner blames the FBI, saying that while agents never said he could threaten judges, they coached him on the limits of what he could say. As a result, Turner said he felt he had wide latitude. "I was given specific instructions," he said.

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The NY Times reports here and here that the Jordanian militant who killed numerous CIA and Jordanian intelligence operatives was considered by the CIA to be one of its most promising informants. From the Times:

American intelligence officials said Tuesday they had been so hopeful about what the Jordanian might deliver during a meeting with C.I.A. officials last Wednesday at a remote base in Khost that top officials at the agency and the White House had been informed that the gathering would take place.

Instead, the discovery that the man, Humam Khalil Abu-Mulal al-Balawi, also known as Humam Khalil Mohammed, was a double agent and the killing of seven C.I.A. operatives in the blast were major setbacks to a spy agency that has struggled to gather even the most ephemeral intelligence about the whereabouts of Osama bin Laden.

few criticized the agency's impulse to chase any credible lead about the locations of Al Qaeda's top leaders. "This is the C.I.A's top priority, and when I was in Afghanistan, if any intelligence came about the possible whereabouts of Zawahri or bin Laden, you dropped everything to run it to ground," said a former senior C.I.A. officer. "Everyone would have wanted to be on the team that caught Zawahri. That's the kind of thing that makes careers."

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This post from TalkLeft "Govt Wires Lawer as Informant to Tape and Incriminate Inmate" describes the disturbing story of defense attorney Terry Haddock who secretly recorded more than 30 conversations with inmate Shannon Williams who has now been charged with money laundering. Haddock says he told Williams that he (Haddock) wasn't acting as his lawyer; Williams says he hired Haddock to represent him. I argue in the book that the spread of snitching has affected the role of the defense attorney--this is a prime example. From TalkLeft:

Even if Haddock told Williams he wasn't representing Williams in the lawsuit, if he gave advice on it, it seems reasonable that Williams would think Haddock was providing legal counsel to him and that they had a privileged relationship. It's not a requirement of the lawyer client privilege that the lawyer officially you in a court proceeding.

Of course, when a lawyer participates in the client's crime, the crime-fraud exception to the attorney-client privilege kicks in and the privilege no longer applies. But it's one thing for the client and lawyer to agree together to violate the law, and another for the cops on their own to get the lawyer to pretend to to agree with the client to violate the law. The latter, even if legal, seems morally bankrupt.

After all, why would Williams trust Haddock with the illegal details of his business? Because he trusted him. Why did he trust him? Because he thought he was his lawyer.

Whether it turns out to be legal or not, it's a really crummy way to make a pot and money laundering case. While I'm not shocked the U.S. Attorney's office and police department used the tactic, I can think of no justifiable excuse for Haddock. Like Pignatelli, he brings shame to the legal profession, and if only one defendant out there reads about Haddock and decides not to trust his or her lawyer with the truth, hindering their lawyer's ability to mount an effective defense, it's one person too many.

Some things are more important than catching drug dealers, and the public's faith in the sanctity of the attorney-client privilege is one of them.

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The New York Times just ran this piece entitled Muslims Say FBI Tactics Sow Anger and Fear. The piece describes the perennial tension between law enforcement's need to gather information and the needs and rights of groups and communities against whom informants are used. From the article:

Since the terror attacks of 2001, the F.B.I. and Muslim and Arab-American leaders across the country have worked to build a relationship of trust, sharing information both to fight terrorism and to protect the interests of mosques and communities. But those relations have reached a low point in recent months, many Muslim leaders say. Several high-profile cases in which informers have infiltrated mosques and helped promote plots, they say, have sown a corrosive fear among their people that F.B.I. informers are everywhere, listening. "There is a sense that law enforcement is viewing our communities not as partners but as objects of suspicion," said Ingrid Mattson, president of the Islamic Society of North America, who represented Muslims at the national prayer service a day after President Obama's inauguration. "A lot of people are really, really alarmed about this."

The implications of informant infiltration, however, go beyond legal rules. Cases from the Vietnam War and civil rights eras describe how government informants undermined anti-war, civil rights, socialist, and other political organizations by provoking conflict and instigating illegal activities. Thirty years ago, MIT sociology professor Gary Marx wrote a seminal piece on the informant provocateur phenomenon entitled "Thoughts on a Neglected Category of Social Movement Participant: The Agent Provocateur and the Informant," 80 Am. J. Sociol. 402 (1972). Marx argued that informants can actually become an integral and problematic part of social organizations, warning that "undercover agents can seriously distort the life of a social movement; they can serve as mechanisms of containment, prolongation, alteration, or repression."

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Two fascinating stories from Forbes on the IRS's expanded Whistleblower Office: Tax Informants are on the Loose, and IRS Ordered to Surrender Informant Documents. In 2006, Congress told the IRS to start paying informants as much as 30% of delinquent taxes collected in big cases, and the scale of snitching has skyrocketed. As Forbes puts it:

The gambit seems to be working very well. The IRS continues to get thousands of small case tips a year. But in fiscal 2009, ended Oct. 30, the IRS Whistleblower Office also logged big case leads on 1,900 taxpayers, up from 1,246 in fiscal 2008, the first full year the new law was in effect. Dozens of these tips involve purported tax losses of $100 million or more. Sure, those are just allegations. But informants "often provide extensive documentation to support their claims,"' the Whistleblower Office noted in a report. The Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration, in a separate report, added up all the 2008 tips and found that $65 billion in unreported income was alleged.

Before the new law, [IRS Whistleblower Officer Director Stephen] Whitlock notes, "if you participated in the tax noncompliance--you could have been the accountant doing the ministerial activity--you could be flat-out barred" from a reward. Now such a functionary is eligible for a full reward, even if he is convicted of, say, stealing from the company he squeals on. An informant who "planned and initiated" a tax scheme is still eligible for a reduced award--unless he's convicted for that planning role.

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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.

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Here's a revealing article in the Buffalo News: Walking thin line in Village of Attica: Would-be informant says police coerced her into cooperation. It's about Bianca Hervey, a 20-year-old college student who got pulled over by police for failing to pay her traffic tickets. The police threatened to put her in jail for the night, unless she agreed to become a drug informant. Although Hervey did not use drugs or have any connections to the drug world, police told her it didn't matter--she could still work as a snitch and try to set people up. Frightened of going to jail, Hervey signed the informant agreement. When she told her father, attorney Richard Furlong, what had happened, however, he "went ballistic." Furlong went to the police and to the City of Attica and complained about the recruitment of young people into the world of drugs, but the police and the Village Board refused to change the policy.

This story illustrates how snitching has quietly become such an immense part of the criminal justice system. Many cities have policies like Attica's, in which police can recruit any potential offender as a drug informant--even a 20-year-old guilty of nothing more than a traffic violation. It was this same type of policy that led to the death of 23-year-old Rachel Hoffman in Tallahassee, Florida, and triggered Florida's ground breaking legislation on the subject of informant-creation. See post: Florida's "Rachel's Law" offers some protections for informants.

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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.

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"Wall Street Meets the 'Wire,'" is a post from earlier this week on White Collar Crime Prof Blog, discussing the criminal case against billionaire hedge-fund manager Raj Rajaratnam for insider-trading. Here's a link to the news story on Bloomberg. The post focuses on the unusually aggressive use of wiretaps in the investigation, and asks whether the government was authorized under the federal wiretap statute to do so given the availability of cooperating informants. As the post explains:

Title 18 U.S.C. § 2518(3)(c) provides that a court issuing a wiretap authorization order must determine whether normal investigative procedures have been tried and have failed or reasonably appear to be unlikely to succeed if tried or to be too dangerous. This "necessity requirement" obligates the government to set forth a full and complete statement of specific circumstances explaining why traditional investigative techniques were insufficient or the application must be denied. In determining the sufficiency of an affidavit, a reviewing court must ensure that the issuing court properly performed [its] function and did not 'serve merely as a rubber stamp for the police'. The government is not under an obligation to exhaust all alternative means of investigation in satisfying the necessity requirement but, neither should it be able to ignore avenues of investigation that appear both fruitful and cost-effective.
Given that the government had three co-conspirators, including one as early as January 2006, acting as informants and cooperating witnesses, and that these individuals had unfettered access to Rajaratnam and others involved in the alleged conspiracies, the question arises whether the government deliberately stalled this investigation and actively resisted utilizing normal investigative techniques, hoping to induce the court into believing that only a wiretap could succeed.

This story illustrates the intimate legal relationship between informants and other forms of surveillance. The law privileges informant use, forcing the government to justify its use of wiretaps if informants are available--note that the post refers to snitching as a "normal investigative technique." Moreover, the law permits the government to circumvent the courts entirely and avoid asking for permission to record conversations if it can find an informant who will agree to the surveillance. The usual explanation for this hierarchy is that electronic surveillance is one of the most intrusive forms of investigation and therefore should be a means of last resort. Wiretapping is of course supremely invasive, but this fact obscures the fact that informant use can be similarly intrusive, i.e. when the government threatens friends and colleagues with criminal charges to get them to report on and record people they know. For those who are interested, Chapter Two of the book discusses informant law in detail.

White collar informing shares important characteristics with its street counterpart. Both confer a vast amount of discretionary, unreviewable authority on law enforcement. Both exacerbate power inequalities among potential offenders, as well as between vulnerable offenders and the government. In both arenas, the decision to permit cooperation means that the government is tolerating and forgiving crime, and sometimes even creating an atmosphere in which crime may flourish. And both deprive courts, and thus the public, of significant amounts of power over and information about the operations of the executive.

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The Washington Post reports today on the sentencing of Bush White House official David Safavian, former chief of staff at the General Services Administration. Safavian was convicted of lying to federal investigators about thousands of dollars worth of perks and benefits he received from corrupt lobbyist Jack Abramoff. I think it is useful to follow the ripples left by the Abramoff affair because he is the paradigmatic example of what is both great and problematic about snitching. The great version: a bad guy cuts a deal with the government that exposes even worse guys, or "bigger fish," and heightens public awareness of flaws in the system. This is the best argument for offering lenience to serious offenders--on balance it can create a greater public good, and indeed Abramoff's conviction and cooperation has led to numerous other convictions and stronger ethics rules. The problematic version: Abramoff received a four-year sentence for his massive and ongoing corruption, not to mention a lesser sentence on a totally unrelated fraud charge in Florida. Had Abramoff sold a tablespoon of crack cocaine he would have gotten more prison time. Moreover, his cooperation has resulted in convictions of just a few "big fish": Congressman Bob Ney, Deputy Interior Secretary Steven Griles, as well as today's Safavian. While there have been other related convictions, they have mostly been of aides, other lobbyists, or players less powerful and culpable than Abramoff himself. Were these convictions worth letting the poster-child for corrupt lobbying off so lightly? This is the perennial dilemma with snitches: it is very hard to know whether we are actually getting more security and justice by letting them off the hook, or whether we too easily forgive serious wrongdoing in the name of cooperation.

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Yesterday on CNN, Anderson Cooper reported on the terrible story of 16-year-old Derrion Albert who was beaten to death by four other teenagers in Chicago. The beating was captured on videotape--story here. Four people have been charged so far. Police Superintendant Jody Weis told Cooper that no one has come forward to identify three other potential perpetrators, even though numerous people witnessed the event. Weis stated, "We are literally getting killed by this code of silence, this no-snitching rule. We've worked hard to overcome it." Cooper responded as follows:

This is something we focused on a lot on this program over the years. I did a piece on 60 Minutes about it as well. This whole stop snitching effort, rappers are telling people don't be a snitch. And now the definition of a snitch is not just somebody who is involved in a crime and tries to rat out someone else they were involved with. Now there's this horrible definition of being a snitch is anybody who comes forward and talks about a crime they've seen. That's just the mentality that cannot be tolerated.

The "stop snitching" phenomenon turns out to be complex, deep-seated, and long-standing. It did not begin with a DVD or a rap song, nor will it end when ["stop snitching"] t-shirts go out of style. It is simultaneously a criminal code of the street, a reflection of widespread communal distrust of police, as well as, more recently, a tool of intimidation against civilian witnesses. While the phenomenon was born in the penal system, it has spread beyond its criminal roots, a product of the multifaceted challenges of urban crime, gang violence, race, drugs, and policing through criminal informants.

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In this extensive New Yorker article, reporter David Grann tells the story of how Texas prosecuted and executed Cameron Todd Willingham for the alleged arson murder of his three children. Willingham always insisted on his innocence, and recent forensic evidence indicates that the fire was in fact an accident. A Texas government commission is reviewing the case--as Grann puts it, if the commission concludes that Willingham did not set the fire, "Texas could become the first state to acknowledge officially that, since the advent of the modern judicial system, it had carried out the 'execution of a legally and factually innocent person.'"

There were two controversial kinds of evidence used at Willingham's trial. The first and most important was the state expert's opinion that the fire was intentionally set. The second was the testimony of Johnny Webb, a jailhouse snitch with drug and mental health problems, who was hoping to "get time cut" off his robbery and forgery charges and who testified that Willingham confessed to him. Eight years after the trial, in 2000, Webb recanted his testimony, but within months he recanted again. Here are a few excerpts from the story describing Webb.

Not long after Willingham's arrest, authorities received a message from a prison inmate named Johnny Webb, who was in the same jail as Willingham. Webb alleged that Willingham had confessed to him . . .During Willingham's trial, another inmate planned to testify that he had overheard Webb saying to another prisoner that he was hoping to "get time cut," but the testimony was ruled inadmissible, because it was hearsay. . . . [Years later, in 2009, reporter David Grann interviewed Webb.] After [Grann] pressed him, [Webb] said, "It's very possible I misunderstood what he [Willingham] said." Since the trial, Webb has been given an additional diagnosis, bipolar disorder. "Being locked up in that little cell makes you kind of crazy," he said. "My memory is in bits and pieces. I was on a lot of medication at the time. Everyone knew that." He paused, then said, "The statute of limitations has run out on perjury, hasn't it?"

The New Yorker story is centrally about the role of bad forensic expertise, and it highlights similarities between experts and informants. Both are paid and controlled by one side, both have a stake in the outcome, and both offer testimony that is difficult to cross examine or rebut. Professor George Harris wrote an article on these similiarities entitled "Testimony for Sale: The Law and Ethics of Snitches and Experts," in Pepperdine Law Review, in which he argues that experts and snitches alike should be subject to more rigorous controls and adversarial testing. In particular, he offers a proposal, on which I expand in my book, to create "defense informants," i.e. informants who could testify for defendants and receive the same kind of benefits that informants can now receive only by testifying for the prosecution.

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The Wall Street Journal Law blog posts here that U.S. District Judge Richard Sullivan has refused to let cooperator Frank DiPascali out on bail, even though DiPascali has pled guilty and is helping the government unravel the Madoff scheme. The reason this is newsworthy is that everyone expects courts to treat cooperators well, even when they've committed major crimes (DiPascali's crimes include helping Madoff, lying under oath to SEC investigators, and forging documents--he faces 125 years in prison). In other words, Judge Sullivan is the exception that illustrates the rule. It is more typical for prosecutors and courts to quietly accommodate cooperators--keeping them out on bail, dropping charges, and even helping them with criminal cases in other jurisdictions. In my view, and as I argue in my book, these commonplace accommodations and the culture of cooperation more generally have skewed the criminal system's approach to culpability. Offenders are evaluated as much for their usefulness as their wrongdoing, and even the most heinous crimes have become opportunities for negotiation. For a haunting example, read this story in the Washington Times entitled Drug Dealer Avoids Jail in Daughter's Killing, about a drug informant who avoided punishment for the death of his daughter who died of, among other things, a fractured skull and severe malnurishment.

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Thanks to Scott Henson from Grits For Breakfast for passing along this important story on a battle raging within the St. Louis police department. Rank-and-file police are refusing to provide information about their snitches to their own police supervisors and city police officials. Here's an excerpt:

Worried about liars in their ranks, city police officials are demanding that up to 20 officers tell bosses details about their confidential informers. But the St. Louis Police Officers Association has won a temporary restraining order to block the inquiry, pending a hearing in court next week. The organization says the probe would jeopardize informers' lives, officers' careers and public safety. At issue is whether officers have attributed fabricated information to confidential informers to obtain search and arrest warrants. Police brass acknowledge in court filings that they believe "one or more" officers "have included false information in affidavits" for warrants, and say the investigation is aimed at stopping "the concerns of police abuse and violation of civil rights."

The fact that street cops are at odds with their own police officials on this question reveals some deep dynamics about snitching, including what I call the culture of secrecy surrounding the entire practice. Police and their informants are heavily dependent on one another--police need information while offenders need protection against punishment. Police will often go a long way to protect their sources, famously from defendants and courts, but often from prosecutors and even sometimes from their own police supervisors. This does not mean that police handlers are necessarily corrupt: handling criminal informants inherently means doing unsavory things like ignoring their crimes, bending the rules, sometimes providing addicts with cash for drugs. However, the culture of secrecy makes illegal police conduct that much easier. See this NYT story on Brooklyn police who supplied their informants with drugs. Kudos to the St. Louis police officials who are trying to make the process more accountable and transparent.

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TalkLeft picked up on this story about a Secret Service informant who, while assisting the government, launched one of the largest identity theft operations in U.S. history. Back in 2003, Albert Gonzalez avoided indictment for identity fraud by becoming a snitch; his cooperation resulted in the dismantling of a significant identity theft ring of which he appeared to be the ringleader. He kept on with his criminal activities, however, apparently even using his government connections to warn other hackers.

This is simply one of the biggest problems with informant use: the fact that offenders can use active cooperation not only to avoid punishment but to continue offending. It is a problem inherent in snitching: the most useful informants are typically the most active criminals, so the government has to tolerate some amount of criminality in exchange for information about and access to criminal activities. The scale of the phenomenon ranges: from the small (addicts who stay on the street by providing information to police) to the large (drug dealers who remain in operation by informing on colleagues and competitors) to the mind-boggling (terrorists who provide information to the U.S. government while participating in new terrorist activities). In my book I write extensively about the harm that this practice can cause in high-crime urban communities in particular. When law enforcement tolerates crimes committed by cooperating offenders, whether it is drug use, property crimes, or violence, the neighborhoods in which those offenders live have to put up with it.

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