Prosecutors’ Tool : Snitches--New Story Is Emerging

They lie. They cheat. They can be manipulative and devious double-crossers. Many of them are robbers, rapists, kidnapers, even killers.

They are, in the words of a well-known veteran prosecutor, “outright conscienceless sociopaths to whom truth is a wholly meaningless concept.”

They may be universally despised, yet they are frequently the best thing going in the government’s war on crime.

They are snitches, or informants, who provide crucial testimony to help prosecutors put others behind bars--usually getting lenient treatment, perhaps even money, as a quid pro quo.

Were it not for them, there undoubtedly would be fewer convicted felons behind bars. Prosecutors, in short, cannot live without them in many cases.

Innocent Victims

But defense lawyers say the age-old but murky practice of using informants to help the state prosecute criminals raises the specter of innocent people being framed.

“There are just so many reasons for informants to lie,” said John Irwin, an author and professor of sociology at San Francisco State University, who has studied the role of informants in criminal prosecutions.

The practice of using informants has always been controversial. But it is coming under new debate in light of a recent incident in Los Angeles, where a County Jail inmate demonstrated for authorities that he could obtain inside information about a crime to concoct a “confession” that could be used against the suspect in that crime.

That demonstration, by Leslie V. White, has touched off an unprecedented review by the office of Los Angeles County Dist. Atty. Ira Reiner of all murder prosecutions in the last 10 years in which an informant provided key testimony. In the interim, Reiner has also ordered top-level reviews of all requests by the county’s 800 prosecutors to use an informant.

Escalation Seen

To many reform-minded critics, the renewed debate is long overdue--and all the more so because, some say, the practice seems to be escalating sharply.

“There’s no question about it,” criminal defense lawyer and Harvard law professor Alan M. Dershowitz said. “Informing has become, if not an honorable trade, a mass occupation.”

“It’s a terrible problem and it’s really gotten out of hand,” added Rebecca Campbell, executive director of the defense-oriented California Attorneys for Criminal Justice.

Informants are being used “promiscuously to obtain information about the most trivial and the most serious of crimes,” Dershowitz said. “They manufacture crime in order to sell their product. They lie about crime in order to give their employers what they think he wants to hear.”

In Los Angeles, Reiner said, the number of criminal prosecutions in which jailhouse informants are used is “infinitesimally small.” But, he added, “that doesn’t mean that it is insignificant. It comes up in some important, serious cases.”

To be sure, not all informants are shady characters. As Dershowitz acknowledged in a telephone interview:

“Informants serve a good purpose, too, like when a good organization is trying to monitor the Klan or the Nazis. And the civil rights movement was helped enormously by the use of informants during the 1960s.”

The problem, however, is that the use of informants remains “a very unregulated and lawless area of the law,” Dershowitz contended.

Ill-defined? Perhaps. Lawless? No, says Gary Mullins, executive director of the California District Attorneys Assn.

“I don’t know that there should be a hard and fast policy. My guess is that there’s a general community of understanding out there among the prosecutors,” Mullins said. “The use of informants is one of the areas governed by experience, and that’s not necessarily a bad thing.”

Strict Standards Wanted

Dershowitz said there should be specific guidelines and standards to govern the use of informants. To simply allow prosecutors to decide on a case-by-case basis whether to use an informant is insufficient, he said.

“Such decisions must be made “on a rule-by-rule basis. Case by case is just a way of prosecutors saying, ‘Leave us alone,’ ” he said.

Prosecutors concede that informants generally make less-than-ideal witnesses. Stephen S. Trott, a former senior Los Angeles County prosecutor and more recently associate attorney general of the United States, has called snitches “the scum of the Earth.”

Trott, widely regarded as a national expert on the use of informants, declined to be interviewed for this story, citing his current job as a U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals judge. But he did not object to having his numerous speeches and papers on the topic quoted. To use an informant is to wade into a “watery and treacherous domain,” he said. The practice, Trott added, is “an endeavor loaded with unmarked pitfalls for the unwary.”

Defense lawyers could not agree more.

“Informant testimony is always extremely suspect,” said Mary Broderick, an attorney with the National Legal Aid and Defender Assn. in Washington. “People in custody are always looking for ways to get out. There are some prosecutors so eager to get a prosecution that they’ll ignore unmistakable signs of deception.”

Such pitfalls indeed abound, Mullins conceded. “Even the best prosecutors can be deceived by informants. But any prosecutor worth his or her oats would delve into the motives of the informant.”

Vital Role Told

But all too often, prosecutors simply have no choice but to use informants. In many cases, prosecutors would have little or no case were it not for an informant’s testimony--for one simple reason: Typically it is the informant who had played a lesser role in a crime and thus knows its intimate details.

And so, in the hands of a smart prosecutor, informants can be “a vast and magnificent bonanza,” Trott said.

Among successful government cases that have relied at least in part on the testimony of informants include the prosecutions of Charles Manson, the Watergate conspirators, the Hillside Strangler, the Walker-Whitworth espionage ring and the insider-trading scandals on Wall Street.

One explanation for the increasing reliance on informants is what Irwin called the “emergence of the counter-ethic” among criminal suspects and convicted felons.

“In the old days, there was a lot of prisoner solidarity,” he said. “But that started changing in the 1950s with the emergence of all kinds and types of prisoners--dope fiends, hustlers--and that blew it apart. The ethic then became self-serving: Snitch first and get the best break for yourself. It became a dog-eat-dog world. It became everybody for himself. Now there’s a much more individualist ethic.”

And along with it, Irwin contended, came the growing recognition and a willingness by law enforcement officials to tap into, and enlarge, the shadowy network of informants.

Pressures Reported

“It is very difficult to get prosecution in a lot of cases where there’s not much concrete evidence. So they began using all kinds of pressures to get people to inform on others. And now it has become a main mechanism for investigations,” Irwin said.

“So many people now are (informing),” he added. “There was always the persistent pressure for self-gain. Now they (law enforcement authorities) are getting people to inform even when information is not there. They create it.”

Irwin estimated that 70% of all informants’ testimony is invalid. “But we don’t have a mechanism to determine what is valid and what is not,” he said.

Whatever the reason, the potential availability of informants indeed seems to be increasing.

For instance, in a highly publicized case in which two former LAPD officers were accused of murder for hire, 16 informants stepped forward to offer testimony to the effect that the two officers, Richard Ford and Robert Von Vilas, had made jailhouse confessions to them. (None of the would-be informants were called, according to Deputy Dist. Atty. Robert P. O’Neill, who successfully prosecuted the case.)

Similarly, Denver lawyer Larry Pozner said he has defended cases in which no less than five would-be informants “stood in line” with an offer to testify against his client. The outraged Pozner, a frequent lecturer at seminars for defense attorneys, added:

“Prosecutors take people they have called slime and liars and suddenly they tell the jury: ‘You can believe this person.’ It’s garbage. A disaster. It’s the quickest way to injustice we’ve ever seen.”

Because of the prevalence of snitches nowadays, Pozner said, he routinely requests that his clients be put into solitary confinement while awaiting trial.

Similarly, Sacramento defense attorney James S. Thomson tells his clients: “Do not talk to anyone about your case.”

Defended by Reiner

One ardent defender of the use of informants is Reiner.

“Jailhouse informants obviously have been used forever and everywhere,” he said in a recent interview. Added Reiner:

“The test has always been: There must be independent evidence that corroborates what the informant has said. That has always been the criteria. We never rely just on the credibility of the jailhouse informant. There must be independent evidence that objectively corroborates what an informant has said. That is still the test.”

Last Thursday, Reiner’s chief deputy, Gregory Thompson, issued further new guidelines barring all use of testimony by jailhouse informants unless that informant has “concrete evidence” that another suspect has confessed--such as a recording in a suspect’s own voice or documents in a suspect’s own handwriting.

“It would not be appropriate to use the jailhouse informant when you cannot independently establish credibility,” Reiner said.

Trott agreed. “Always start from the proven rule of thumb that the jury will not accept the word of a criminal unless it is corroborated by other reliable evidence,” he said.

Corroboration, he said, “is to an accomplice’s testimony as gasoline is to a car: Without it, you get nowhere.”

Former prosecutor Trott readily conceded the hazards of using informants.

“Criminals are likely to say and do almost anything to get what they want, especially when what they want is to get out of trouble with the law. . . . A drug dealer can sell out his mother to get a deal; and burglars, robbers, murderers and thieves are not far behind.”

Worse, Trott said, is that “a ‘reliable informant’ one day may turn into a consummate prevaricator the next.”

Defense Tactics

Such traits present formidable barriers for prosecutors because, he said, “in the hands of a skillful defense tactician, all the liabilities and the unseverable baggage that such a witness brings to your case . . . become the elements of reasonable doubt the defense is looking for and the brush with which the rest of your case is then tarred.”

In other words, Trott said, the government’s greatest strength in a case can also be its greatest weakness.

But when all is said and done, snitches are an indispensable weapon for prosecutors.

“The fact of the matter is that police and prosecutors cannot do without them--period,” Trott said. “If a policy were adopted never to deal with criminals as prosecution witnesses, many important prosecutions--especially in the area of organized crime and conspiratorial crimes--could never make it to court.”