Who's Watching the Snitches?

These days, countless informants are talking with police, prosecutors and federal agents in the United States. They influence criminal cases and make secret deals, and the information they provide -- right or wrong -- will lead to prisons sentences and other grave consequences.

So who’s watching the snitches?

An excellent three-part series on NPR last week investigated the federal government’s reliance on informants and their shadowy role in our criminal justice system. The series focused on one informant in particular, a Mexican man by the name Lalo. His case is a cinematic tale of violence and intrigue, and a shocking example of law enforcement misconduct in the War on Drugs. One serious accusation against him is that he participated in multiple murders at Juarez’s famous House of Death -- all while working for Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

Everyday informants in America may not have such salacious stories, but their impact on the workings of our courts and police investigations is enormous. Often given incentives -- either money or reduced sentences in exchange for their testimony -- informants have plenty of motivation to lie for personal gain. While the law requires that prosecutors disclose deals with informants, this is rarely done in practice. Only a few state laws require that snitch testimony be corroborated before it's used in court.

Alexandra Natapoff, a law professor at Loyola Law School in Los Angeles, is among the nation’s leading experts on snitching. She writes a great blog on the topic and recently published a book: “Snitching: Criminal Informants and the Erosion of American Justice."

"It's a very clandestine, secretive and unregulated arena that yet influences the outcome of millions of cases and investigations," she says. "It shapes the way we lawyer, it shapes the way we judge, and it shapes what we call fair and good. And yet, we don't see any evidence of it pop up on the public record."

Police in Albuquerque last year posted a newspaper ad recruiting snitches. Crime Stoppers billboards are everywhere, offering to pay cash for tips that help solve crime. There’s a place for this information in criminal investigation, of course, but we desperately need safeguards to ensure that informants aren’t coimmitting crimes while on the police payroll, and that they aren’t giving false information that leads to wrongful convictions.

NPR goes on to report that agencies often toss informants to the wolves once they’ve wrung all relevant information from them. Lalo, for example, has been in solitary confinement for five years as the government tries to deport him -- and he doesn't expect a comfortable return to Mexico. ICE, meanwhile, says it has learned from the Lalo debacle and is changing its procedures on using snitches and handling them if they commit crimes. An internal memo obtained by NPR says agency policy explicitly prohibits using informants who commit crimes -- but a new handbook that includes this rule is still in the works.

"The argument is not, 'Should we get rid of snitching?,’” as Natapoff told NPR. “It is, 'We should handle it the way we handle any other crucial allocation of power and liability'....there should be some accountability mechanism, and right now, there is almost no mechanism for doing that."

(A side note: Kudos to NPR on more top-notch crime reporting, following up the great bail bonds series earlier this month. This is a groundbreaking report that holds the government accountable for unacceptable policies and practices -- anyone who wonders whether publicly funded media can hold the government accountable need look no further than this NPR series.)

Photo Credit: Luc Van Brakel