Many thanks for Michael Rich for sharing his work and insights. Additional guest bloggers coming soon.

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As my brief tenure as a guest blogger here comes to an end, I just want to thank everyone for reading my contributions. I hope that I have been able to add in a meaningful way to discussions about how best to use, manage, protect, and recruit informants. For those of you who are interested, I hope that you will keep tabs on my profile on SSRN, where I hope soon to be posting my most recent work on informants, including an article discussing the moral status of informing and how that status should impact when and how police and prosecutors recruit and use informants and another contemplating the propriety and value of police encouraging civilians to commit immoral acts in the name of fighting crime. Until then, thank you.

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The Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court recently rejected a motion by Calvin Carnes, a convicted killer, to stay his appeal pending his attempts to seek a new trial on the ground that the prosecution withheld exculpatory evidence. The evidence in question was an affidavit of a jailhouse informant who claimed that Robert Turner, one of Carnes's accomplices, confessed to the homicides. The Suffolk District Attorney's Office justified waiting eighteen months to turn over the affidavit on the ground that they had needed time to check out the informant's story, meet with Turner's attorneys, and, assuming the informant's story was true, allow Turner more time to make incriminating statements. The prosecutors further argued that the delay didn't matter because the informant was "unreliable and untrustworthy based on his extensive criminal history and the fact that he was giving inaccurate and incomplete information." The response of Ellen Zucker, Carnes's attorney, is worth quoting in full:

Prosecutors use jailhouse snitches all the time when they’re seeking prosecution of somebody. In each case, they have a profile not dissimilar to Mr. Smith, [the informant in this case]. It would be very curious if the district attorney took the standard they’re applying to Mr. Smith and applied it to every jailhouse snitch they put on the stand to try to get a conviction.

Continue reading "Jailhouse snitches for the defense" »

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San Francisco City Attorney Dennis Herrera has filed suit seeking a civil injunction against forty-one young, African-American men who he alleges are members of two rival gangs. If granted, the injunction would impose a 10 p.m. curfew on the men and forbid them from "trespassing, selling drugs, and illegally possessing firearms, loitering, displaying gang signs, and associating in public" in a two-tenth square mile area in San Francisco. Unlike a criminal action, none of the listed individuals have a right to counsel to defend against the action and given that the injunction deals with residents of a public housing project, it is unlikely that they have the funds to hire their own. As for how the men are identified as gang members, the City Attorney's Office applied criteria also used in other states, including Florida, Tennessee, South Dakota, and New Hampshire, for IDing gang members. Under these standards, an individual must meet at least two of ten criteria to be considered a gang member, and two of the criteria are informant-related: "Subject has been identified as a gang member by a reliable informant/source," and, "Subject has been identified as a gang member by an untested informant or source with corroborative evidence." Though how the criteria are applied is murky, the plain language of these two suggests that one can be identified by law enforcement as a gang member almost entirely by informant action. Indeed, if two informants, one reliable and one untested, finger the same person as an informant, that might be enough, so long as the reliable informant is deemed "corroborative evidence" for the untested informant's identification. And, as the San Francisco case shows, the implications of such an identification are far-reaching.

Continue reading "Using informants to ID gang members (and other secondary uses of informants)" »

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On Wednesday, FBI Special Agent Robert Fuller testified that the US government paid informant Shahed Hussain about $100 per day and $52,000 total for his work in helping to plan a fake plot to bomb a New York City synagogue. The four individuals that he worked with are currently on trial for their roles in the plot. In Florida, Tampa police and the FBI paid an informant approximately $2,400 per month to set up twelve alleged gang members. On its own, neither rate is extraordinary. But now in the Florida case, some of the twelve accused gang members have filed suit against the FBI, the city of Tampa, and individual officers, claiming malicious prosecution and civil rights violations. The criminal cases against alleged gang members were thrown out after a state court judge found egregious misconduct by the informant in the case. Even if the civil case is unsuccessful, the cost to the taxpayers of defending it will be significant and will certainly dwarf the money originally paid to the informant. These legal costs are an inevitable part of a system that thrives on minimal oversight and self-enforced guidelines.

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The government often rewards informants for their illegal activity. A petty drug dealer is not prosecuted if she provides information on her supplier, information she would not have were she not involved in the drug trade. A member of an organized crime family receives leniency for his crimes in exchange for testimony against a crime boss. An informant is paid to assist in planning a terrorist attack and testify against the other planners. But few American cases parallel a recent incident in Germany:

German authorities in the state of Baden-Wuerttemberg are examining tax information offered by an informant detailing what may be illicit funds stashed in Swiss accounts, though they said they won’t buy stolen data.

This is only the latest in a string of cases (detailed here) in which insiders at banks in Switzerland, Luxembourg, and Liechtenstein have stolen bank account data and attempted to sell it. The potential buyers are the home countries of the owners of the accounts, to whom significant quantities of tax revenue are owed. In the best-known incident, Germany's foreign intelligence service paid an employee of a subsidiary of Liechtenstein's largest bank more than 4 million Euros for stolen account information on 600 Germans, many of whom were evading German tax laws. As I will attempt to explain, these cases raise interesting and important questions about the ethics and wisdom of rewarding criminal activity.

Continue reading "Rewarding illegal informant activity -- a German example" »

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There is no shortage of slang terms for informants: "weasels," "rats," "stool pigeons," and, of course, "snitches." And none imply positive things about those who assist the police. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, to "weasel" means "to escape from or extricate oneself out (of a situation, obligation, etc.), esp. dishonourably." A "rat" is "a man who is deceitful or disloyal in a romantic relationship," "a person who deserts his or her party, side, or cause," "a person who gives information, esp. of an incriminating nature, on another person to the police or other authority, an informer." And to "snitch" is "to inform upon or on a person" or "to take surreptitiously, purloin." Yet, despite the negative connotations of these slang terms, they (and particularly "snitch") are used synonymously with "informant" in journalism and academic debate, where at least the appearance of neutrality is valued. For instance, a search of news articles over the past year finds thousands of uses of the word "snitch." Many of course are found in direct quotations or a similar context, but some simply refer to informants as snitches, and thus import the negative connotation into a presumably neutral forum. A fair number of law review articles incorporate the word "snitch" in the title. And this blog is called, "Snitching Blog."

Continue reading "The power of labels" »

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Since everyone in the criminal system knows that high-profile murder suspects are prime targets for jailhouse snitches, why not try to nip it in the bud? That's what one Arizona public defender tried to do, asking the judge to keep other inmates away from his client Pamela Phillips if those other inmates were also represented by the public defender's office. Were such inmates to come forward as snitch witnesses, it would create a conflict and the public defender's office could no longer represent Phillips. Story here: Pre-emptive anti-snitch move fails. The judge denied the motion, but its a good example of proactive lawyering that builds on our growing knowledge of how jailhouse informants operate.

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The city of Atlanta has agreed to pay $4.9 million to the family of Kathryn Johnston, a 92-year-old woman who was killed by police acting on a false tip from an unregistered informant. The police then planted drugs in Johnston's home to cover up their failure to follow the law and Atlanta Police Department policy on informant use. (A fuller account of the Johnston case can be found here.) The settlement properly reflects the egregious nature of the misconduct in the case, but the more important question is whether the settlement can properly be said to bring "[o]ne of the most divisive chapters in the history of the Atlanta Police Department . . . to a close." While it certainly marks the end of what the court system can do to assuage the pain caused by Johnston's death, the settlement marks the end of the chapter only if the steps that the APD and the City of Atlanta have taken to make sure that a similar incident does not happen again are likely to be effective.

Continue reading "Tailoring solutions to informant problems" »

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By the end of his stint working for the FBI, informant Craig Monteilh was earning over $11,000 a month to secretly film and record worshippers at the Islamic Center of Irvine, California. Monteilh, who has a lengthy rap sheet of his own, is now suing the FBI for allegedly instructing him to plead guilty to criminal charges of grand theft so as to maintain his cover. The Associated Press report on Monteilh's lawsuit reveals details of the informant's world that the public rarely gets to see, particularly the government's ability to use private individuals/informants to obtain information that the government would otherwise need evidence of wrongdoing and a warrant to obtain: US Judge gives informant time to amend FBI lawsuit. From the story:

In court papers and his ACLU declaration, [Monteilh] says he was asked to work as an informant for local law enforcement in 2004, when he became friendly with some police officers in a local gym. By 2006, he was promoted to the FBI's counterterrorism operations. Monteilh alleges he gathered phone numbers and contact information for hundreds of Muslim-Americans and recorded thousands of hours of conversation using a device on his key fob or cell phone during his stint with the FBI. His said his handlers told him to work out with Muslims at gyms, asked him to get codes for security systems so they could enter mosques at night and encouraged him to ask mosque members about "jihad" and supporting terrorist operations abroad. In June 2007, however, mosque members became suspicious of Monteilh and requested a restraining order, saying that he had spoken repeatedly about engaging in jihad.

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Yesterday, Hal Turner, a shock jock and blogger popular with the Ku Klux Klan, Aryan Nations, and American Nazi movements, testified in his own defense at his criminal trial. Turner is charged with making threatening blog posts about Judges Posner, Bauer, and Easterbrook of the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals, in which he suggested that the three judges deserved the same fate as District Court Judge Joan Lefkow for a decision upholding handgun bans in Chicago and a suburb. Judge Lefkow's husband and mother were murdered in 2005. Turner's defense is that the posts were not actual threats, and his testimony outlined his four-year stint as an FBI informant.

Continue reading "Judged by the company you keep" »

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The police department in Jacksonville, North Carolina is facing criticism for using a fugitive as an informant in a drug sting. The sting resulted in 394 felony counts charged against 45 suspects, though these numbers paint a misleading picture of the sting's success. First, the charges have resulted mainly in sentences of probation and in little jail time. Moreover, at least two of those targeted in the sting have claimed that the informant fabricated drug buys. The trial of one ended in a hung jury, and police are concerned about the credibility of the informant in light of his fugitive status. Finally, the informant, who is accused of shaking a five-month-old child so hard that she suffered a broken arm, cracked ribcage, and retinal bleeding, has yet to face any possible punishment for an offense allegedly committed almost two years ago.

Continue reading "The limited value of police policies on informant use" »

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On July 25, the New York Times reported on the release by Wikileaks.org of more than 92,000 U.S. military documents relating to the war in Afghanistan. While interesting from a number of angles, for our purposes the story is a tale of two informants that highlights complicated questions of loyalty and society's treatment of informants. The first informant in the story was Pfc. Bradley Manning, an Army soldier who allegedly transmitted the leaked reports to Wikileaks. While not an "informant" in the traditional sense, as he did not help the government apprehend criminals, Manning played the informant's role by revealing miscalculations and fatal mistakes, if not crimes, committed by the U.S. military in Afghanistan. The second informant was Adrian Lamo, who reported Manning's involvement in the leak to federal authorities. What no one seems able to agree on, however, is whether Manning and Lamo are heroes, villains, or something in between.

Continue reading "The Wikileaks informants" »

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Before I get started, I'd like to thank Alexandra Natapoff for the opportunity to contribute to this blog. I look forward to providing a different and (hopefully) interesting take on the problems and contradictions that arise from law enforcement's dependence on, and society's complicated relationship with, criminal informants. So, let's start with one of the contradictions:

When newspaper reporters and columnists write about informants outside the context of wrongful convictions, the tone tends to be one-note, excoriating "stop snitching" culture. A recent editorial by Bill Maxwell, a columnist for the St. Petersburg Times, is typical. (A couple of similar recent articles or columns are here and here.) Criticizing the black community in Tampa Bay for ostracizing three women who helped two police officers after they had been shot, he also takes on the "snitching ethos":

If we do not call the police, we deserve the mayhem and dysfunction we suffer. When we conceal the identity of a murderer, we endanger everyone. When we turn our backs on drug deals near our homes, we cheapen the rule of law and destroy social values. In addition to its self-destructiveness, the snitching ethos alienates us from others, putting us at odds with normal behavior.

Maxwell's points generally are well-taken, if not particularly novel. But another recent column also caught my eye. This one, by Marc Hansen of the Des Moines Register, bears the headline, "Iowan mails Lefty's arm back to bar, won't snitch on thief." Far less gruesome than it sounds, the story involves the theft of a mannequin's left arm from a bar in San Francisco and its subsequent return by Doug Kintzle, a Des Moines resident who had it in his basement. Hansen explains that though Kintzle knows who stole the arm, the culprit is part of his cycling group, and Kintzle refuses to "snitch." As Hansen says, "you have to respect that." And I think he's right: most people would have no problem with Kintzle staying mum and protecting his friend.

But why is the Maxwell's "snitching ethos" bad, and Kintzle's refusal to "snitch" good? Despite the presence of a stolen plastic arm, I ask the question non-facetiously: in both cases we're talking about crimes that the police can't solve without an informant's help, yet in one case refusing to snitch is reprehensible and in the other it's respectable.

(posted by Michael Rich)

Continue reading "Rich on "stop snitching"" »

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I am very pleased to introduce Snitching Blog's first guest blogger: Professor Michael Rich formerly at Capital University Law School and recently moved to Elon University School of Law. Professor Rich has written about the use of informants as a potential violation of the Thirteenth Amendment, which prohibits involuntary servitude. From the abstract:

Though active informants cooperate for many reasons, most assist the police out of fear that if they refuse, they will be subject to criminal prosecution or more severe punishment. This Article argues that by compelling these "coerced informants" to work under such a threat, the government violates the Thirteenth Amendment's prohibition on involuntary servitude. As a doctrinal matter, compelling coerced informants to serve under threat of criminal sanction fits the Thirteenth Amendment's definition of involuntary servitude. Moreover, the use of coerced informants offends the free labor principles that animated the passage and ratification of the Thirteenth Amendment and underlie the Supreme Court's Thirteenth Amendment jurisprudence.

Link to article here: Coerced Informants and Thirteenth Amendment Limitations on the Police-Informant Relationship, 50 Santa Clara L. Rev. 681 (2010). Professor Rich will be here throughout August.

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