The heart of snitching is the deal between the government and the criminal suspect, in which the government permits the suspect to avoid potential criminal liability or punishment in exchange for information. It should no longer be permitted to operate off-the-record and in the shadows. The use of criminal informants is an important public policy that determines the outcome of thousands of investigations and cases every year, costing millions of dollars and touching millions of lives. It is time for this state of affairs to change. Moreover, because the deals between criminal suspects and the government tend to remain undocu-mented and unregulated, there is very little public data about the ways that police and prosecutors wield their immense discretion to create, forgive and deploy informants. But the significant costs and dangers of the policy have remained almost com-pletely overlooked. To be sure, informants can be a valuable investigative tool, offering the government a powerful weapon against criminal organizations and hard-to-crack cases. Such stories of crime and violence illustrate the pervasive and complex role that informants play in our justice system. Police sent her on a sting to buy a large amount of drugs and a gun-Rachel was killed during the sting, in May 2008. Caught with a small amount of marijuana and some illegal pills, she agreed to work as an informant in order to avoid prison. ![]() Rachel Hoffman was a Florida State college graduate with a bright future. Sometimes informants themselves are victims. Gonzalez had used his connections with the government to promote his illegal activities and also to tip off other hackers on how to avoid detection. To its embarrassment, the Se-cret Service discovered that one of their top former informants, Albert Gonzalez, was running one of the largest credit card data theft rings in the country. While executing the warrant on November 21, 2006, police shot and killed the 92-year-old grandmother.Ĭriminal informants often continue to commit crimes while working for the government. In order to get the warrant, the officers invented an imaginary snitch, telling the magistrate judge that a non-existent “reliable confidential informant” had bought crack at Mrs. Acting on a bad tip from a local drug dealer-turned-informant, Atlanta police sought a no-knock warrant for the home of Mrs. When police rely on criminal informants, innocent people can pay a heavy price. As part of that ring, prisoners were buying and selling information about pending cases to offer to prosecutors in order to reduce their own sentences. They were convicted based on the fabricated testimony of dozens of jailhouse informants-participants in a for-profit snitch ring operating in the local federal prison. For exam-ple, Ann Colomb and her three sons were wrongfully convicted in 2006 of running a crack cocaine ring in Louisiana. The practice of trading information for guilt is so pervasive that it has literally become a thriving business. Taken together, these facts make snitching an impor-tant and problematic aspect of the way America does justice. While criminal informants-sometimes referred to as “snitches”-can be important investigative tools, using them has some serious costs: informants often continue to commit crimes, while the information they provide is infamously unreliable. ![]() These deals typically take place off-the-record, subject to few rules and little oversight. ![]() From street corners to jails to courthouses to prisons, every year the government negotiates thousands of deals with criminal offenders in which suspects can avoid arrest or punishment in exchange for information. Share: Share on Twitter Share on Facebook Share on G+ Share with emailĪlthough it is almost invisible to the public, the use of criminal informants is everywhere in the U.S.
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