Jailhouse Informants: The D.A.’s Ethical Bind

A few weeks ago in the chaplain’s office on the 13th floor of the Los Angeles County Hall of Justice, a sheriff’s deputy gave jailhouse informant Leslie Vernon White the last name of another inmate whom White had never met. The only other fact given White was that the inmate was a murder suspect.

Over the next 20 minutes, the deputy watched with growing alarm as White phoned the inmate reception center, posing as a bail bondsman; the district attorney’s records office, posing as a deputy district attorney; the district attorney’s witness coordinator, sheriff’s homicide and finally the deputy district attorney assigned to prosecute the murder case.

By the completion of his tape-recorded round of calls, White had obtained sufficient information about the crime and the suspect to testify convincingly that the suspect had given him a jailhouse confession. As a crowning touch to his demonstration, White called a courtroom bailiff and arranged for the murder suspect to be transported to the courthouse holding tank, where White could have arranged to meet the suspect.

White claimed he could just as easily have ordered the suspect’s release from county jail.

The implications of his demonstration were not lost on Dist. Atty. Ira Reiner, Los Angeles Police Chief Daryl Gates and Los Angeles County Sheriff Sherman Block when the three listened to White’s tape in Block’s office three days later. “The question that’s been raised,” said Public Defender Wilbur Littlefield, who was not invited to the meeting at Block’s office, “is how many people are there in state prisons and on death row as a result of manufactured jailhouse confessions?”

The district attorney’s office calls jailhouse informants as witnesses in almost every murder case it prosecutes where the case appears weak, said Richard G. Hirsh, former president of California Attorneys for Criminal Justice.

Three days after White’s demonstration, Reiner announced that his office would investigate every criminal conviction over the last 10 years obtained at least in part by the testimony of a jailhouse informant.

While that length of time represents an enormous number of convictions, it is an appropriate minimum for Reiner’s study. White, a seven-time convicted felon, has been a jailhouse informant for 11 years. And he is only one of more than 80 red-wristbanded “K-9s,” as informants are classified, currently in jail at the Hall of Justice.

But for Reiner’s office to be conducting a thorough and impartial investigation of informants’ testimony is no more appropriate than entrusting the investigation to a large firm of defense attorneys.

Informants don’t work for free. In exchange for their testimony against fellow inmates, the district attorney rewards informants by assisting them in obtaining benefits ranging from extra telephone time to early release and witness-protection money.

Last year Chief Deputy Dist. Atty. Curt Livesay, the third-ranked official in the district attorney’s office, wrote a thinly veiled request to the commissioner of the Board of Prison Terms that White’s sentence be reduced. Livesay pointed out that White had testified for the district attorney in three murder cases and one residential burglary--all in the span of only 36 days.

White was released from jail three weeks later, several months ahead of his scheduled release. He was also given money for relocation because of alleged threats from a defense attorney against his wife. He went back to jail on a purse-snatching charge and was sentenced Oct. 23 to serve 16 months.

In the McMartin Pre-School case, the district attorney obtained immunity from prosecution for perjury for nine-time convicted felon George Freeman. In exchange, Freeman testified that McMartin defendant Raymond Buckey had confessed to him when, in violation of jail policy that requires K-9s to be segregated from other inmates, Freeman had been placed in Buckey’s cell. (Last week the judge in the case ordered Buckey moved to isolation after a defense attorney noted that Buckey’s new neighbor in confinement was White.)

The perjury for which Freeman received immunity stemmed from testimony about jailhouse confessions he had given in two murder cases. Freeman was also paid relocation money because of alleged threat from a defense attorney.

In this year’s trial of Harles E. Hamilton for the 1984 murder of a former president of the Pasadena Bar Assn. and his wife, the district attorney signed a four-page legal agreement with jailhouse informant Michael J. Dawson. Dawson was facing a 40-year sentence on burglary and prior conviction charges. The agreement promised that the district attorney would “request of the sentencing judge that Michael Dawson’s previous two-year state prison commitment be recalled for resentencing to time served.”

The eight-time convicted felon, who once had a $400-a-day heroin habit, was released from jail immediately after testifying that Hamilton had confessed to him.

The incentive to testify against fellow inmates is so widely recognized that the practice is commemorated in a series of jailhouse jokes. Among them: “Don’t go to the pen, send a friend” and “Why spend time, just drop a dime.”

The “snitch operation,” as it is known in the county jail, provides the district attorney’s office with a seemingly bottomless pool of prosecution witnesses.

McMartin defense attorney Daniel Davis calls the informants “snitch-o-matics” and refers to the prosecution’s use of multiple informants as the “phenomenon of empty magnification.” In the McMartin case, the district attorney listed seven jailhouse informants as potential witnesses against Buckey, though used only one.

The district attorney used five different jailhouse informants in its four unsuccessful efforts to convict Hamilton.

In the case of two former Los Angeles police officers, Richard Ford and Robert Von Villas, accused of murder for hire, 16 informants claimed that the pair had made jailhouse confessions to them.

Stephen Vulpis, himself a jailhouse informant, found 14 fellow K-9s lined up against him when he was tried and convicted for murder this year.

Did the prosecuting district attorneys in these cases genuinely believe the jailhouse informants they called to testify were credible witnesses? Would Buckey have confessed to a fellow inmate not just once, but seven times? Would two former Los Angeles police officers, presumably familiar with the “snitch operation” in county jail, confess to a fifth of the K-9 population? Would a K-9 confess to other K-9s?

Reiner’s proposed investigation must address these and other questions.

How did so many K-9s learn so much about so many cases? Are all of them really as gifted as White, who appears to have manipulated modern technology and age-old human gullibility to contaminate the criminal-justice system with fabricated jailhouse confessions? Or is it more likely that the vast majority of jailhouse confessions were simply fabricated from newspaper stories, police reports and court transcripts, as White and other informants allege?

And if that is the case, how did the informants get access to these documents? Almost certainly they weren’t provided by defense attorneys. In fact, defense attorneys are so reluctant to disclose anything that might be used against their clients that many have already expressed reluctance to cooperate in any investigation conducted by the district attorney.

Davis, the McMartin defense attorney, spent more than a year investigating jailhouse informants in preparation for cross-examining the seven who were listed as witnesses against his client.

“If I find that the body making the inquiry is essentially the district attorney . . . don’t expect my cooperation,” Davis said. “The strongest opposition to my own inquiries has always come from the district attorney.”

Davis and other defense attorneys contend that if Reiner’s staff was unaware that informants systematically fabricate jailhouse confessions, it is because they chose not to know.

“The district attorney sits back and says he never told the snitch to get information,” said veteran public defender Forrest Latiner. “But let’s not kid ourselves--the circumstances are set up so the snitch can be in an adjoining cell. The district attorney knows the snitches aren’t reliable because these people will sell their souls for whatever small benefit they might get.”

Second only to determining if innocent people have been sent to prison as a result of fabricated jailhouse confessions, the most important question an investigation must address is this: How were informants systematically able to get away with perjury?

Has the district attorney really been duped all these years by the addicts, forgers, burglars, thieves and parole violators who make up the Hall of Justice K-9 population? Or has the office known all along about the pervasive perjury perpetrated on the criminal courts system by jailhouse informants?

Whatever the answer, the district attorney’s office will clearly be in conflict of interest if it retains the responsibility for investigating its own use of jailhouse informants as witnesses for the prosecution.