Snitching: Criminal Informants and the Erosion of American Justice, Second Edition

by Alexandra Natapoff

Overview

Reveals the secretive, inaccurate, and often violent ways that the American criminal system really works

Curtis Flowers spent twenty-three years on death row for a murder he did not commit. Atlanta police killed 92-year-old Kathryn Johnston during a misguided raid on her home. Rachel Hoffman was murdered at age twenty-three while working for Florida police.

Such tragedies are consequences of snitching. Although it is nearly invisible to the public, the massive informant market shapes the American legal system in risky and sometimes shocking ways. Police rely on criminal suspects to obtain warrants, to perform surveillance, and to justify arrests. Prosecutors negotiate with defendants for information and cooperation, offering to drop charges or lighten sentences in exchange. In this book, Alexandra Natapoff provides a comprehensive analysis of this powerful and problematic practice. She shows how informant deals generate unreliable evidence, allow serious criminals to escape punishment, endanger the innocent, and exacerbate distrust between police and poor communities of color.

First published over ten years ago, Snitching has become known as the “informant bible,” a leading text for advocates, attorneys, journalists, and scholars. This influential book has helped free the innocent, it has fueled reform at the state and federal level, and it is frequently featured in high-profile media coverage of snitching debacles. This updated edition contains a decade worth of new stories, new data, new legislation and legal developments, much of it generated by the book itself and by Natapoff’s own work. In clear, accessible language, the book exposes the social destruction that snitching can cause in heavily-policed Black neighborhoods, and how using criminal informants renders our entire penal process more secretive and less fair. By delving into the secretive world of criminal informants, Snitching reveals deep and often disturbing truths about the way American justice really works.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781479807703
Publisher:	New York University Press
Publication date:	11/15/2022
Pages:	288
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x (d)

About the Author

Alexandra Natapoff is the Lee S. Kreindler Professor of Law at Harvard Law School, and a 2016 Guggenheim Fellow. She is the author of Punishment Without Crime: How Our Massive Misdemeanor System Traps the Innocent and Makes America More Unequal and editor of ​​The New Criminal Justice Thinking.

Table of Contents

Foreword Barry Scheck xiii

Introduction: A Tale of Three Snitches 1

1 The Real Deal 17

I Anatomy of an Informant Deal 19

A Police 20

B Prosecutors 23

C Defense Counsel 25

D The Crimes 27

E The Rewards 29

II Implications of Informant Practices 31

A Crime-Fighting Benefits 31

B Compromising the Purposes of Law Enforcement 33

C Who's in Charge around Here? 37

D Mishandling and Corruption 38

E Crime Victims 40

F Vulnerable Informants 41

G Witness Intimidation and the Spread of Violence 46

H Systemic Integrity and Trust 47

2 Informant Law 49

I Creating and Rewarding Criminal Informants 50

A Police 50

B Prosecutors 53

C Sentencing and the U.S. Sentencing Guidelines 54

D Additional Benefits: Money and Drugs 57

II Using Informants as Investigative Tools 57

III Defendant Rights against Official Informant Use 60

IV Legal Limits: What the Government Can't Do 63

V Informant Use in Comparative Perspective 67

VI American Informant Law 70

3 Juries and Experts 72

I Juries 73

II Limits to the Trial Truth-Seeking Process 75

III Human Psychology 78

IV Experts 80

V Informant Expert Testimony 82

VI Juries and Experts Going Forward 85

4 Beyond Unreliable 87

I Lying Informants 87

II Law Enforcement Dependence on Informants 90

III The Corroboration Trap 94

IV When the Innocent Plead Guilty 97

V The Important but Limited Role of Procedural Protections 99

5 Secret Justice 101

I Investigation 102

II Plea Bargaining 107

III Discovery 110

IV Public Transparency and Executive Accountability 112

V Informants in the Digital Age 115

6 The Community Cost 119

I More Snitches 122

II More Crime 127

III More Violence 130

IV Racial Focusing and Inequality 131

V More Tension between Police and Community 132

VI More Social Instability 137

VII Snitching as a Counterproductive Social Policy 139

7 How the Other Half Lives 141

I FBI Informants and Organized Crime 143

II White Collar Crime and Cooperation 149

A Individual White Collar Cooperators 151

B Corporate Cooperation 155

1 Nonprosecution and Deferred Prosecution Agreements 156

2 The Employer-Employee Problem 160

C White Collar versus Street Snitching 162

III Political Informants 163

A Infiltrators and the First Amendment 164

B Political Corruption 168

IV Terrorism 170

8 Regulation and Reform 179

Regulating the Informant Market 182

I Defining Informants 183

II Aggregate Data Collection on Informant Creation and Deployment 184

III Informant Crime Control 185

A Legislative Limits on Crimes for Which Cooperation Credit Can Be Earned or Used or Offered 186

B Limits on Crimes That Can Be Committed by Active Informants 187

C Reporting Informant Crimes 188

D Prosecuting Informant Perjury 188

IV Protecting Informants 189

A Limit the Use of Vulnerable Informants 189

B Counsel 191

C Witness Protection 193

V Defense Informants 193

VI Police Guidelines 195

VII Prosecutorial Guidelines 196

VIII Heightened Judicial Scrutiny 198

IX Criminal Procedure Reforms 199

A Tracking, Discovery, and Disclosure 200

B Reliability Hearings 201

C Corroboration 202

D Jury Instructions 204

X Improving Police-Community Trust 205

Conclusion 207

Acknowledgments 211

Notes 213

Index 259

About the Author 267

Editorial Reviews

"Alexandra Natapoff’s groundbreaking work upends much of what we know—or thought we knew—about how the criminal justice system works. . . Natapoff shows how police and prosecutors routinely reward informants with an array of benefits, ranging from cash to freedom, which are largely hidden from public view. Her damning account illuminates the profound unfairness and devastating consequences of incentivized testimony. Snitching is a revelatory book that will forever change the way we look at the role that informants play in both policing and criminal prosecutions."

senior reporter at ProPublica and staff writer at Pamela Colloff

"One of the truly impressive contributions of the book comes in [Natapoff’s] explanation of the effects of widespread use of informants for the criminal justice system, our social structures, and our democracy. . . . Snitching should find a place in every law school course looking at legal issues in the criminal justice arena, and on the syllabi of every university course in criminal justice that aims to give students a realistic and nuanced view of how the system really works."

Criminal Justice

"The supply [of cooperators] is endless. I should know. There were at least three in the trials against me. After it was discovered that the first two cooperators had been offered favors and weren’t telling the truth, they never appeared again. The state just produced a new one. This book really explains how this process worked in my trials, and how it still works in others’. My hope is that this book shines a light so that other people do not have to suffer through what I did."

exonerated in 2021 after serving twenty-three year Curtis Flowers

"This book, Snitching, was a godsend for me, especially as we fought to get ‘Rachel’s Law’ passed. The book educated all of us in such a meaningful way: legislators, law students and family members and friends. My daughter’s murder propelled ‘Rachel’s Law’ into reality and so it has helped create a safer and more effective law enforcement system. This knowledge acts as an emollient for my heart in healing. However, we still need this book and more work to create stronger laws and more accountability. I hope people read it and see how many citizens are being endangered and harmed, all victims from this corrupt system."

advocate and mother of murdered 23-year-old inform Marjorie Weiss

"Superb . . .a searing indictment of how the secretive dynamics of informing have helped corrupt inner city life in America, and a deep scholarly analysis of how our legal rules contribute to this problem and can be reformed to mitigate it. This brilliantly original book is ...wise and ruthlessly honest in its understanding of the street level practices of informant-reliance."

Robert Weisberg

"This book […] was a godsend for me, especially as we fought to get ‘Rachel’s Law’ passed. The book educated all of us in such a meaningful way: legislators, law students and family members and friends."

advocate and mother of murdered twenty-three-year- Marjorie Weiss

"Natapoff has written a compelling and searing book about snitching. It not only comprehensively describes the problem, but offers sharp, clear, and unambiguous solutions. If we really want to address the legal and moral implications of snitching, every judge, defense lawyer, prosecutor, and police officer should read this book."

Charles J. Ogletree