Most Law Enforcement Agencies Routinely Keep Informants’ Files

Major law enforcement agencies routinely keep detailed files on their informants, including data on their truthfulness and reliability, without compromising the informants’ security, top agency officials said this week.

“This is, in my judgment, a very common practice, standard procedure among the larger law enforcement agencies and probably among most of the law enforcement agencies in California,” said Jack B. White, chief of the bureau of investigation for the Los Angeles County district attorney’s office.

While White’s bureau maintains extensive records on informants used by its 200 agents, the nearly 800 lawyers who handle criminal cases for the district attorney’s office have no similar clearinghouse to track informants who offer to testify in court.

At least two prosecutors had suggested implementing such a system. One proposal was submitted as the result of a prosecutor’s lengthy and frustrating effort to warn her colleagues against using a notorious jailhouse informant, Leslie Vernon White, whom the prosecutor knew to be a liar.

However, top officials of the district attorney’s office rejected the suggestions to create an informant clearinghouse largely, they said, because they fear a central file might put informants’ lives in danger.

“That means that defendant X is going to get the names of all informants and you’re going to get them all killed,” Assistant Dist. Atty. Curt Livesay, the office’s third-ranking executive, said in explaining the decision.

In October, Leslie White, a longtime informant currently in jail, showed authorities he could gather enough information over a jailhouse telephone to fabricate the confession of a defendant whom he had never met.

That demonstration triggered concern that some criminal defendants may have been convicted on the basis of phony confessions devised by jailhouse informants seeking leniency in their own cases. It also prompted an extensive, ongoing review by the district attorney’s office of cases in which informants had testified.

Despite the security concerns expressed by the district attorney’s office, officials of the Los Angeles Police Department, the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department, the California Department of Justice and the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration said this week that their informant files are necessary and are sufficiently protected by law to prevent the unintended disclosure of sensitive information.

“I wouldn’t call it a problem,” Steve Helsley, acting assistant director of the state Justice Department’s division of law enforcement, said of the potential for wholesale disclosure of informants’ names.

Defense attorneys on occasion have tried to gain access to the Undesirable Informant File maintained by the Los Angeles Police Department, said Cmdr. William D. Booth, a department spokesman. “We have resisted those efforts and so far we have been successful,” Booth said.

Joseph Keefe, a spokesman for the Drug Enforcement Administration in Washington, said, “I feel protected, yes.”

The spokesmen said their records include data on informants’ general reliability, as well as the number of cases in which they have been used and personal information.

“It’s absolutely essential that we maintain the integrity of our investigations,” said Oliver Taylor, chief of detectives for the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department. “If we don’t have the opportunity to review the established credibility of informants, then we are flying in the dark each time an informant surfaces.”

Even if a judge rules that an informant’s name must be disclosed, authorities have the ultimate option of dismissing the criminal case to protect the secret information, Taylor said. “That’s all part of the judicial review process,” he added.

Jack White of the district attorney’s bureau of investigation said he always has been concerned about the confidentiality of his informant index, but added:

“In my judgment right now, I think we need to maintain an informant file. . . . The informants are very closely guarded secrets, and we don’t even tell other agents who they are. But we do have at the superior level the ability to check on those informants.”

Several prominent defense lawyers said they believe there is no reason why they and their colleagues would have greater access to prosecutors’ informant files than they now have to police files.

For the most part, the attorneys said, the defense in a criminal case is entitled through the court discovery process only to background information about specific informants who have been identified by the prosecution as witnesses against their clients. Few defense lawyers said they could foresee circumstances under which they would seek access to an entire informant file.

“There certainly has been no institutional effort to get ahold of all those files,” said David Meyer, chief of central court operations for the Los Angeles County Public Defender, the largest government-operated public defense office in the nation.

“I think the most I could do is find out whether the informant involved in my case is on that list and what information they have about that informant which would impact on his credibility,” said defense attorney Harland W. Braun, whose past clients have included film director John Landis.

Gerald L. Chaleff, who represented convicted Hillside Strangler Angelo Buono, said the argument advanced by the district attorney’s office against a central index “is not realistic. . . . You’re only entitled to information about a specific informant and in a specific case.”

“That’s generally true,” said Richard G. Hirsch, immediate past president of California Attorneys for Criminal Justice, a 2,000-member defense Bar association. But he added, “If informant A has done some work with informant B and they have somehow concocted stories, I think that (information about the second informant) would be discoverable in more depth.”

Chaleff said he believes the rights of some defendants have been compromised by the failure of the district attorney’s office to establish a central clearinghouse for informant data.

“There have been a number of people denied discovery and due process, not by any particular individual prosecutor, but by the prosecutors’ office. I’ve had cases where I made a motion about the informant who they dealt with and what you get is a D.A. saying, ‘I’ll tell you what I can find out.’ ”

But that prosecutor may not be able to turn up all the information on that informant that is available in the district attorney’s office without the aid of a centralized record-keeping system, Chaleff said.