Staff Failed to Alert Him of Concern on Using Jail Informants, Reiner Says

Los Angeles County Dist. Atty. Ira Reiner said Thursday that his senior staff did not alert him to the concern among lower-level prosecutors that unreliable jailhouse informants were being used as prosecution witnesses.

But Reiner vigorously defended the use of jailhouse informants as indispensable and said a new policy governing their use would prevent any abuses.

Without criticizing any of his management staff by name, Reiner said he has taken “generalized” steps to ensure that future dissenting opinions from the ranks will reach him.

“That sort of communication is one of the things we’re looking at, of course,” he said. “I’d like to be secure in the knowledge that every piece of information that I need is always brought to me. But I know perfectly well that it isn’t.”

Reiner also called his office’s ongoing investigation of all murder cases in which jailhouse informants testified in the last decade “one of the most thorough-going and most forthcoming inquiries that any department has ever made that I’ve ever heard of--about anything.”

Reiner’s comments, in a monthly meeting with reporters, underscored the growing controversy that has engulfed his 800-prosecutor agency in the aftermath of a startling demonstration last October by Leslie Vernon White, a County Jail inmate and longtime prosecution informant.

Bail Bondsman

By using a jail telephone and posing alternately as a bail bondsman, prosecutor and police detective, White showed sheriff’s deputies that he could gather enough inside information about a murder case in order to later claim that the defendant had confessed to him while they were together in the same cell. For providing confessions, jailhouse informants typically get preferential treatment.

White’s demonstration raised the specter that some defendants might have been wrongly convicted on the basis of concocted confessions.

Since White’s demonstration, Reiner has instituted the review of murder cases and established new guidelines that severely limit the use of informants as prosecution witnesses.

On Wednesday, The Times revealed that within the last two years, two prosecutors had proposed the creation of a central index within the district attorney’s office so that prosecutors could determine an informant’s reliability. In one instance, the idea was discussed by Reiner’s top staff and dismissed. In the other, it was never considered.

Reiner said he was not told of the proposals by Deputy Dist. Attys. Peter S. Berman and Katherine Mader, although they “should have been brought to my attention.”

But Reiner would not single out any individual for criticism.

“It’s not appropriate for me to start specifically commenting on specific individuals within the office,” he said measuredly. “We’re looking at everything.”

Since the White controversy erupted, Chief Deputy Dist. Atty. Gregory Thompson has issued numerous guidelines governing the use of informants, including a requirement that every request to use an informant be unanimously approved by the office’s three directors of criminal prosecution.

This unprecedented authorization amounts to a “central index and more,” Reiner said Thursday. In addition, Thompson ordered that no testimony of an informant can be used without “concrete” corroborating evidence, such as a tape recording in a suspect’s voice or a statement in that suspect’s handwriting.

Before the new guidelines, each prosecutor was free to use informants as he or she saw fit.

“That has been the criteria that had been used over the years,” Reiner said. “But obviously, that isn’t as valid as it was thought to be. So that criteria is no longer used.”

In his staunch defense of the use of informants, Reiner said it is not uncommon for criminal defendants in jail to talk of little else but the acts with which they are charged, often boastfully. Thus, when an informant comes forward, he said, “you can’t turn the other way.”

“Nor should you responsibly turn the other way just because the person that gave you the information is himself in jail or is willing to tell you where the body is buried if he can get a weekend pass or whatever it is that motivates that particular person,” he said.

The test, however, is to independently corroborate such information, Reiner said.

“You have to take extraordinary steps to assure credibility,” he concluded.