A lawyer may be able to communicate with the agent to notify the agent you no longer wish to work as a snitch, or at least get an idea of how many more times the agent expects you to work. A lawyer may be able to get at least an end in sight and put a final date or final buy of this nightmare you signed up for.
In other words, the police claim that your charge will be lessened or maybe even go away if you work as a snitch for the police. The police can use information gained from the CI about you that the Government can use when prosecuting your case.
Believe it or not -- it is legal for law enforcement to pay a government snitch! Even with the promise of payment, the decision to become a CI is very dangerous. People who are arrested because you are a CI can put your life and the life of your loved ones in danger.
Prosecutors eager to close a case often reward criminals with sentence reductions for inaccurate, manufactured or questionable “evidence” or testimony against another offender. The case of federal prisoner Marcus Watkins is one example of the unintended consequences of the institutionalized culture of snitching.
According to a 2012 USA Today investigation that examined hundreds of thousands of court cases, “snitching has become so commonplace that in the past five years at least 48,895 federal convicts – one out of every eight – had their prison sentences reduced in exchange for helping government investigators....”.
The use of snitches has become so prevalent that the practice and its damaging effects are the subject of a book, Snitching: Criminal Informants and the Erosion of American Justice, by Alexandra Natapoff, published in April 2011.
Knowing that jurors fear crime and seek safer neighborhoods , U.S. Attorneys and their local district attorney counterparts gather information to use as evidence in criminal cases from whomever they can, including prisoners seeking to shorten their sentences.
Two officers, Terrence Mercadal, a black man, and Jared Robinet, a white man, arrived on the nighttime scene in South Sacramento. Several minutes later, Mercadal and Robinet were running up a dark driveway, pursuing the suspect, flashlights clearing their sight. “Hey!
More officers arrived on the scene and muted the audio of their body cameras, as shown in the more than 50 videos and two audio clips that Sacramento Police Department released in April. Nearly two months have passed and only protesters have been arrested.
Communities of color are actually disproportionately likely to report crimes —it’s police themselves who have maintained a corrosive culture of silence. By Ibram X. Kendi.
Black people, in other words, have every reason not to snitch. And yet, the evidence shows, we still do—even as we are ridiculed for not doing so. Police officers have every reason to snitch. And yet they still commonly do not—and get praised as if they commonly do.
Police officers do not require certainty to exact the certainty of death. Both officers unloaded 20 shots into the darkness, at the darkness.
In his forward to that report, the Police Foundation’s president, Hubert Williams, wrote, “Most of America’s police officers are honest, dedicated, hard-working public servants, and it is they, as well as the public they serve, who are victims of the ‘bad’ cop.”.
Police officers, however, do not appear to be commonly snitching on themselves, and accepting plea agreements. There is a no-snitch police culture that may be as widespread and harmful as the myth of a no-snitch black culture.
A lawyer may be able to communicate with the agent to notify the agent you no longer wish to work as a snitch, or at least get an idea of how many more times the agent expects you to work. A lawyer may be able to get at least an end in sight and put a final date or final buy of this nightmare you signed up for.
If the CI doesn’t testify against you but the State uses the evidence from the CI against you, your attorney would need to know how to argue against the admissibility of this information.
The reason for this is the police use the CI to gain probable cause for your arrest. 5.
People who are arrested because you are a CI can put your life and the life of your loved ones in danger. Whatever the amount of money that may be offered in exchange for you becoming a CI may not be worth you and your loved ones being put in danger. This decision can affect you and others for the rest of your life. 7.
There is case law that the defense attorney can argue about disclosing the identity of tipsters versus active participants in criminal cases that involve CI’s. The identity of the CI can be necessary to a Defendant’s defense in their criminal case.
The recording devices used have become very sophisticated and are virtually undetectable. It is not like the old school movies where you can see a “wire” taped under someone’s shirt. The equipment has evolved with technology and the cameras can be as simple as a pair of glasses, a keychain, a button on a shirt, etc.
The CI meets you at a certain place and unknown to you, the police are watching the whole deal. You may not see or notice the police. Typically the police are in plain clothes in an undercover vehicle.. All of this is a disguise so that you cannot know the police are watching.
When you have a single police officer, or several officers committing misdeeds, including murder, against members of the communities they are sworn to “serve and protect,” and those deeds go un checked by fellow officers or the precinct watch commanders who are responsible for controlling and reigning in the bad conduct of their officers in the field, the communities will equate those misdeeds to the entire force. This is human nature, and to be expected. It is up to the police precincts to foster and maintain a more cooperative relationship with their communities. In order to do this, they must bring those officers responsible for criminal activities within those neighborhoods, to justice. It is inexcusable to make any attempt to justify criminal activity committed by law enforcement, and to expect the communities to support those same law enforcement officers. A “code of silence” has no place in law enforcement.
One of the police whistleblowers outed the incident surrounding the shooting death of Laquan McDonald by another police officer as something other than a justified police shooting. It took a year after the shooting for this new evidence, via the police dash camera, to come to light and expose the shooting death to be a case of murder. The video shows a Chicago police officer firing 16 rounds into a black teenager, who was armed with a small knife, and who appeared to be trying to get away from the officer, not advancing toward him in a menacing manner. The majority of the bullets fired into McDonald were fired while he lay in the street dying.