Grits for Breakfast reports:
Prof. Alexandra “Sasha” Natapoff of Loyola Law School in Los Angeles has posted on her faculty page a sample 11-page Motion Requesting Snitch Reliability Hearing (Word doc) in federal court. She also included the motion as an appendix in her upcoming article in the Golden Gate University Law Review. (See a draft version of “Beyond Unreliable: How Snitches Contribute to Wrongful Convictions.”)
I consider Sasha Natapoff probably the premier thinker in America today regarding confidential informants – her 2004 article in the Cincinnatti Law Review, which I blogged about here, helped open my eyes for the first time to the depth and scope of how informant use has corrupted American law enforcement. And her December 2005 feature in Slate (which generously linked to a couple of Grits posts) helped popularize some of those ideas more broadly for the first time. I admire her work a lot.
Grits is one of my favorite blogs. I blogged about this post of his on 7-12. The Center for Wrongful Convictions has a report, which is linked to the Slate feature mentioned above, citing misinformation from informants as the leading cause of wrongful death penalty convictions. We hear a lot about DNA exonerations, but DNA accounts for only 12%, or 14 ,cases of the 123 death penalty exorenations since 1977.
Also, I’m very concerned that this phenomenon of increasing reliance of law enforcement on “snitches” as part of the “drug war” is what leading to exploding population (an increase of over 400% in the last 20 years or so) of women in prisons.