USA Today: Federal prisoners use snitching for personal gain
By Denny Gainer, Jerry Mosemak and Brad Heath, USA TODAY
December 14, 2012
Between 2007 and 2012:
48,895
Federal defendants got reduced sentences in exchange for cooperating
with the government. That is 1 of every 8 people convicted of a federal
crime. (source: USA Today)
USA Today has a short video about inmates being paid for (false) testimony, aka "snitching":
At
least 48,895 federal convicts - one of every eight - had their prison
sentences reduced in exchange for helping government investigators,
probe shows. Short video:
http://www.usatoday.com/videos/news/nation/2012/12/14/1769361/
ATLANTA
– The prisoners in Atlanta's hulking downtown jail had a problem. They
wanted to snitch for federal agents, but they didn't know anything
worth telling.
Fellow prisoner Marcus Watkins, an armed robber, had the answer.
For a fee, Watkins and his associates on the outside sold them
information about other criminals that they could turn around and offer
up to federal agents in hopes of shaving years off their prison
sentences. They were paying for information, but what they were really
trying to buy was freedom.
"I didn't feel as though any laws were being broken," Watkins
wrote in a 2008 letter to prosecutors. "I really thought I was helping
out law enforcement."
That pay-to-snitch enterprise – documented in thousands of pages
of court records, interviews and a stack of Watkins' own letters –
remains almost entirely unknown outside Atlanta's towering federal
courthouse, where investigators are still trying to determine whether
any criminal cases were compromised. It offers a rare glimpse inside a
vast and almost always secret part of the federal criminal justice
system in which prosecutors routinely use the promise of reduced prison
time to reward prisoners who help federal agents build cases against
other criminals.
Snitching has become so commonplace that in the past five years at
least 48,895 federal convicts — one of every eight — had their prison
sentences reduced in exchange for helping government investigators, a
USA TODAY examination of hundreds of thousands of court cases found. The
deals can chop a decade or more off of their sentences.
How often informants pay to acquire information from brokers such
as Watkins is impossible to know, in part because judges routinely
seal court records that could identify them. It almost certainly
represents an extreme result of a system that puts strong pressure on
defendants to cooperate. Still, Watkins' case is at least the fourth
such scheme to be uncovered in Atlanta alone over the past 20 years.
Those schemes are generally illegal because the people who buy
information usually lie to federal agents about where they got it. They
also show how staggeringly valuable good information has become –
prices ran into tens of thousands of dollars, or up to $250,000 in one
case, court records show.
John Horn, the second in command of Atlanta's U.S. attorney's
office, said the "investigation on some of these matters is continuing"
but would not elaborate.
Prosecutors
have said they were troubled that informants were paying for some of
the secrets they passed on to federal agents. Judges are outraged. But
the inmates who operated the schemes have repeatedly alleged that
agents knew all along what they were up to, and sometimes even gave
them the information they sold. Prosecutors told a judge in October
that an investigation found those accusations were false. Still, court
records show, agents kept interviewing at least one of Watkins'
customers even after the FBI learned of the scheme.
The risks are obvious. If the government rewards paid-for
information, wealthy defendants could potentially buy early freedom.
Because such a system further muddies the question of how informants —
already widely viewed as untrustworthy — know what they claim to know,
"individual cases can be undermined and the system itself is
compromised," U.S. Justice Department lawyers said in a 2010 court
filing.
Read the rest of the article and see the graphic here: http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2012/12/14/jailhouse-informants-for-sale/1762013/
