THE CONFESSION TRADE : 2 Cases Appear to Violate D.A. Rules on Use of Jail Informants

In the wake of Leslie White’s demonstration last fall that he could fake another jail inmate’s murder confession, Los Angeles County Dist. Atty. Ira Reiner moved quickly to tighten his office’s standards for using jailhouse informants.

However, five months later, the spirit of Reiner’s tougher standards appears to have been violated in two cases and the standards themselves remain largely undefined.

This has led to concern among defense lawyers that the potential remains for jailhouse informants to fake confessions.

Leading defense lawyer organizations, including the California Attorneys for Criminal Justice and the Los Angeles Criminal Courts Bar Assn., have decided to campaign for state legislation that would prohibit law enforcement agencies from giving the rewards that informants say encourage them to come forward.

Would Toughen Standard

Sponsored by Assemblyman Richard E. Floyd (D-Carson), the legislation would also require a corroboration standard similar to Reiner’s for informant testimony.

Traditionally, authorities have considered an informant’s account corroborated if they could show that he was together with the suspect in jail and reported facts about the crime that should have been known only by the criminal.

White, however, showed that he could feign having talked to the criminal, and gather his inside information about the crime from law enforcement agencies by posing as a law enforcement agent on the telephone.

Acknowledging that White had proven traditional standards of corroboration unreliable, Reiner had his chief deputy issue a directive on Nov. 17, requiring “concrete evidence” that the defendant had actually given the reported confession to the informant.

Other Types of Evidence

The directive cited tape recordings and handwritten admissions as examples of “concrete evidence,” but said there were other types of unspecified evidence that would also qualify.

To define what this other evidence can be, Reiner is requiring a handful of his most senior executives to unanimously endorse what constitutes sufficient corroboration in an individual case.

Before the White episode, any of the office’s 800 prosecutors could decide on his own whether to use an informant.

So far, these senior officials have formally reviewed six requests to use informants in court, and have approved three. Approval of a fourth is expected shortly.

An undetermined number of other requests have been turned down informally, senior officials said.

Two Appear Clear-Cut

Two of the cases appear clear-cut under the new “concrete evidence” standard.

One involved a purported handwritten admission in the form of a detailed map of a defendant’s house, where a young woman had been stabbed to death.

The defendant allegedly gave the map to the informant, who was a law school graduate, while asking the informant for help in formulating a defense to the murder charge.

The legend to the map included incriminating statements such as “where she sat . . . where I sat . . . where the body fell.”

Another, which is expected to be approved, is a tape-recorded solicitation to murder law enforcement officials.

But in two other homicide cases involving confessions provided by jailhouse informants, the approvals appear to violate the spirit of the requirement for “concrete” corroboration.

For a Different Crime

In one of these, the only concrete corroboration was for a different crime, a burglary of the deceased’s residence that the informant himself committed.

In the other, an informant appeared to meet the requirement by providing information that had not been previously known to the police. However, this information implicated only one of two defendants that the informant claimed to have overheard making incriminating statements. The informant testified against both in a trial that ended with a hung jury.

Gigi Gordon, a defense lawyer and spokeswoman for defense attorneys on the informant issue, predicts that “exceptions will soon swallow the (concrete evidence) rule. . . . We’ll be right back where we started.”

However, the corroboration standard outlined in the legislation proposed by the defense bar is even more vague than the standard set by Reiner. The legislation states that an informant’s testimony can only be used if “it is corroborated by other evidence demonstrating that the statements testified to were actually made by the defendant.” It cites no examples.

Fundamentally Different Views

Ultimately, the disagreement between the defense lawyers and the district attorney’s office on the credibility of informants turns on their fundamentally different views of what life is like in jail.

“Many people find it somewhat incredible . . . that people in jail actually talk about their crimes,” Reiner said in a recent interview. “Most people who have no exposure to that world would think, ‘Good God, If I ever committed a crime and I was in jail, I wouldn’t talk to anybody. My lips would be sealed. . . .’ The fact is . . . in jail, people are always talking about their crimes. . . .

“There are people in jail who keep their ears open,” Reiner added. “As a matter of good public policy, you can’t turn a deaf ear to information that people bring to you.”

However, Leslie Abramson, president of California Attorneys for Criminal Justice, has a diametrically opposed view.

“The notion that . . . someone, upon meeting a perfect stranger, would confess to him is absurd, and not worthy of belief,” she said in an interview. “To persist in this fiction that it does happen by using jailhouse informants is to knowingly or winkingly foster perjury.”

While this debate goes on, so does the district attorney’s review of criminal cases in which jailhouse informants have testified.

Identify 200 Defendants

So far, the district attorney’s office and the defense bar have identified cases in which informants testified against more than 200 defendants.

The Superior Court has agreed to appoint attorneys at public expense to represent convicted defendants who wish to try to reopen their cases by challenging informant testimony. Meanwhile, the state attorney general’s office has agreed to supply the Los Angeles County Grand Jury with a special counsel to investigate the use of jailhouse informants.