Snitching: Criminal Informants and the Erosion of American Justice

I can't tell you how happy I am to see this book published. I don't think Americans have even a vague idea of how much trouble an innocent person can be in once they come under serious scrutiny by the criminal justice system. Arrest warrants can be based on flimsy evidence and insubstantial claims that do not have to be accounted for. Often, innocent defendants are in the position of having to prove they are NOT guilty, and unscrupulous use of plea bargaining can make a false guilty plea seem like a much better deal than the crapshoot of a jury trial. The cost of a serious criminal defense can bankrupt most families and public defenders are worthless plea bargain machines. It can be a true nightmare scenario. What needs to be better understood is that there is vast difference between someone actually being unequivocally guilty of a crime, and there being enough "evidence" - often in the form of testimony and circumstantial evidence - to convict them. During the 1960's and 1970's I was a Special Deputy under four Sheriffs, and have published a number of investigative books. The cases I ran into where I felt that injustice had been done were depressingly common. The cases passed legal muster in the courts, but the outcomes were tragically wrong. Police informants, often criminals themselves or defendants trying to bargain their way out of a very bad situation, account for a fantastic number of criminal cases leading to conviction - in some jurisdictions nearly 50%, especially where narcotics are involved. Law enforcement justifies this situation by claiming that they don't have the resources to actually develop good physical evidence or reliable surveillance, and without dubious informants many guilty defendants would go free. In other words, convicting the innocent is part of the cost of reigning in the bad guys, a kind of "kill them all and let God sort them out" rationale. This kind of thinking has ramifications far beyond the criminal justice system. I don't mean to imply that most criminal defendants are innocent -- most are clearly guilty -- but the number of wrongful convictions is disturbingly high. If you're impressed by the number of capital defendants cleared by the Innocence Project -- now over 250 -- think how many people are wrongfully convicted of lesser crimes that don't draw nearly the attention of a murder trial and where convictions are expected and routine. I think this book is a genuine and very necessary contribution to understanding this problem.