Informant legislation - some progress in two troubling areas of criminal law

Jailhouse informants (persons with pending charges who become witnesses for the prosecution):

Texas has a bill pending that would require corroboration before admitting testimony of jailhouse informants. Jailhouse informants, who will say or do anything in exchange for their freedom from a prosecutor, is among the most serious problems in our criminal justice system. So long as we allow prosecutors to obtain convictions based solely on testimony of jailhouse informants there can be no faith in the reliability of our criminal justice system.

We need reform in when and how we use the testimony of "informants" in our courts. We cannot trust the prosecutors to seek the truth and to adequately corroborate testimony before they call a witness to the stand, therefore we need legislation or court rules to ensure that we are not convicting persons based on perjury, and that testimony against criminal defendants is not for sale in the jailhouses.

Confidential informants (generally used in narcotics purchases):

On the east coast, Florida has passed legislation that would limit law enforcement use of confidential informants - the law would require "agencies to take into account a person's age and maturity, emotional state and the level of risk a mission would entail. Police also would be barred from promising an informer more lenient treatment; only prosecutors and judges can do that." The law would also prohibit using any person who is in drug treatment to go on undercover drug buys.

The Florida law covers the most troubling aspects of law enforcement's use of undercover informants. Often police will make promises that they know they cannot keep - no one can promise a defendant anything in regard to their case except the prosecutor. Narcotics officers will try to get to the defendant before they have a chance to speak with an attorney, and sometimes warn them not to talk with an attorney, to keep them in the dark about what their legal options really are. Often a person will be promised probation if they work with narcs, they will strap on a wire and make buys for the narcs, only to later discover that if they had refused to talk to the police and retained an attorney they would have likely received a probationary sentence anyway.

If a person is trying to get clean or stay clean, they cannot repeatedly go into houses and make drug deals - sooner or later they will use and their recovery will be blown to bits. Many narcotics officers do not care if you stay clean or not - you are a tool that they use to do their job for them. Many narcotics officers do not care that you are placing yourself in danger - again, you are a tool that they require to make drug arrests. Rachel Hoffman's death in Florida, although tragic, was representative of the ethics problems that narcotics officers often ignore in their work and thankfully brought national attention to the problem.