The parents of a slain Longview drug informant have filed claims against Cowlitz and Wahkiakum counties, saying narcotics detectives coerced 26-year-old Jeremy McLean into their service, then failed to protect him from a drug dealer he'd helped police snare.

McLean, who was murdered by William Vance Reagan Jr. in late 2008, was arrested on drug-related charges and "was forced to sign a plea agreement ... in order to avoid incarceration," according to documents filed late last month. The terms of the plea agreement required McLean to become an informant for the Cowlitz-Wahkiakum Narcotics Task Force, according to the claim...

Reagan, who was sentenced to life in prison, confessed to the killing, saying he was trying to keep McLean from testifying against him.

NEW YORK, Jan 23 (Reuters Breakingviews) - A financial snitch has gotten off too lightly. David Slaine, a former Galleon Group employee, pleaded guilty to insider trading and conspiracy but became an informant to help nab others, including the hedge fund and trading scandal kingpin, Raj Rajaratnam. At the urging of prosecutors, a federal judge has rewarded Slaine with probation and community service instead of up to 25 years in prison. Such leniency risks overreliance on criminals. . . .The justice system probably can't crack big cases without the cooperation of unsavory characters, and giving Slaine favorable treatment is justified up to a point. But even for the best information, letting confessed felons like him essentially off the hook is too high a price to pay.

The potential for higher sentences means the incentive to cooperate with the government in an investigation will be that much greater. There is already a significant disparity between the sentences of a cooperating defendant and one who goes to trial, and the best way to avoid the recommended sentence under the guidelines is to help prosecutors convict others....

The benefits of cooperation are likely to be on display in the near future when crucial cooperating witnesses in the prosecution of Mr. Rajaratnam are sentenced. Anil Kumar and Rajiv Goel testified at his trial, and prosecutors are likely to recommend substantially lower sentences than those received by other defendants who pleaded guilty but did not cooperate, like the 30-month sentence given to Danielle Chiesi.

Today's decision is important for a number of reasons. First, it shows that the Justices have joined numerous state and federal legislators in recognizing the problem of informant unreliability. Informant-based wrongful convictions are increasingly frequent in the courts and in the news, and many states have taken up the issue. See Legislation Section of the main website. Although the Court did not answer the question today, it's a sign of the times that the Justices are arguing about it.

Maxwell also shows how the legal debate over informant use is becoming less about procedure and more about substantive questions of reliability and innocence. Until recently, most informant litigation has been a fight over disclosure: the information that the government must disclose regarding its use of compensated criminal witnesses. The Maxwell case and the Sotomayor/Scalia debate squarely confront the substantive question of unreliability: how unreliable can compensated criminal witnesses be before the law restricts their use? Or to put it another way, how high is our tolerance for the likelihood of wrongful conviction? Even Justice Scalia concluded that the informant in Maxwell's case was a "habitual liar," and that there were reasons "to think it likely that [he] testified falsely" at Maxwell's trial. The Ninth Circuit took the next step, holding that the Due Process Clause does not permit such clearly unreliable evidence to be used. As a result of today's cert denial, this holding stands.

Finally, Justice Sotomayor pointed out that the Ninth Circuit relied on "an avalanche of evidence" that the informant in that case was unreliable. The existence of such evidentiary avalanches is a relatively new phenomenon. Thanks to the innocence movement and numerous new studies (see Resources & Scholarship section on the main website), courts and litigators have more evidence than ever before regarding the unreliability of criminal informants. These new data will surely change how courts consider such questions in the future.

[Informants] have helped Mexican authorities capture or kill about two dozen high-ranking and midlevel drug traffickers, and sometimes have given American counternarcotics agents access to the top leaders of the cartels they are trying to dismantle.

The Times story notes that informants can also give rise to "complicated ethical issues," including the fact that informants are typically working off their own crimes. Last year, NPR and Primetime ran stories illustrating the serious criminality that such informants may engage in, even while working for the government: NPR series on House of Death informant and Primetime: U.S. Customs authorizes informant to import cocaine.

The bill would also help the families of two men who were killed in connection with FBI informant Whitey Bulger to recover damages from the FBI. For more background, see these stories in the Boston Globe: Bill would aid kin of two slain men, and Pants on Fire. Full disclosure: I provided information to Congressman Lynch's office in support of this bill and I am strongly in favor of the effort.

This is an important decision for a number of reasons. As Judge Wallace explains in his concurrence, "the specific circumstances pursuant to which an informant's status is deemed "officially confirmed" is a matter of first impression and great importance." This is because the threshold question of whether a person is an informant at all may be a secret. Moreover, the decision clarifies that once the government decides to use an informant or his information at trial, it relinquishes much of its claim to confidentiality under FOIA. As Judge Wallace put it:

On the one hand, prosecutors frequently must rely on informants, who possess vital information, to prosecute dangerous criminals. On the other hand, the DEA and confidential informants have a different interest in secrecy and privacy than federal prosecutors. Yet, under the majority holding, an Assistant United States Attorney can eliminate that privacy interest by asking a single question--i.e., "Did you serve as a confidential informant"--in open court.

Nearly half the prosecutions involved the use of informants, many of them incentivized by money (operatives can be paid as much as $100,000 per assignment) or the need to work off criminal or immigration violations.

Sting operations resulted in prosecutions against 158 defendants. Of that total, 49 defendants participated in plots led by an agent provocateur--an FBI operative instigating terrorist action.

With three exceptions, all of the high-profile domestic terror plots of the last decade were actually FBI stings.

In many sting cases, key encounters between the informant and the target were not recorded--making it hard for defendants claiming entrapment to prove their case.

Terrorism-related charges are so difficult to beat in court, even when the evidence is thin, that defendants often don't risk a trial.

The concept of mesira, which literally means "delivery," dates back to periods when governments often were hostile to Jews and delivering a Jew to the authorities could lead to an injustice and even death. The rules of mesira still carry force within the Orthodox world, owing both to the inviolability of the concept's talmudic origins and the insular nature of many Orthodox communities. But they are also the subject of debate over whether the prohibition applies in a modern democracy that prides itself on due process and civil rights.