The Trouble with Snitches

Sara Jane Moore played two roles last week. When she fired a shot at President Ford she became a failed assassin. She was already an active, paid informer of the U.S. Treasury Department's Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms. The day before the assassination attempt, she had helped a Treasury agent build a case against the dealer who sold her the gun she fired at Ford. Previously, she had spied on radicals for the FBI and worked for the San Francisco police. All in all, a stunning performance in deviousness that would surely give informers a bad name--if they did not have an appalling track record already. Harrison Salisbury, writing in the New York Times, was reminded of the informer in czarist Russia who reported an assassination plot and, when he was disbelieved, turned out himself to be the assassin. During the New York cop-killer man hunt (see following story), one officer left a dollar tip for the waitress after talking with an informer over lunch, then glanced back as he was walking out to see the man pocketing the buck and leaving a quarter instead. "That's just the way informers are," explains the officer resignedly.

Few Bans. Unsavory as they may be, it remains a police adage that "a cop is only as good as his snitch." In fact, many experts believe that in recent years police agencies throughout the U.S. have dramatically increased their use of informers--ranging from undercover officers to turncoats and professional finks. "Liberals are as much at fault as conservatives," says Harvard Law Professor Alan Dershowitz. In the '60s, informers by the hundreds infiltrated not only radical movements but also Southern racist groups such as the Ku Klux Klan. Sara Jane Moore's lurch into the limelight has only renewed the debate about law enforcement's almost unchecked reliance on the breed.

One reason for the lack of control is that most informers never appear in court. They help to catch an offender, but are usually not needed to convict him. And when an informer does testify, courts tend not to be bothered if he is guilty of seamy behavior. In 1973 the Supreme Court swallowed substantial involvement by a federal agent in the manufacture of methamphetamine pep pills (speed) because the other plotter had demonstrated that he was already disposed to commit the crime. Actual entrapment, however, is banned. The only other major prohibition is against using an informer to infiltrate a legal defense. That would, of course, violate the defendant's constitutional right to a lawyer. But the Constitution does not otherwise trouble informers much.

Some lawyers want to change all that. Citing the right to privacy and the ban on unreasonable searches, Washington Attorney Nathan Lewin argues that planted informers are "live bugs" and as such should be used only after a judge issues a warrant. Earlier this year the California Supreme Court accepted the argument that using undercover law-enforcement agents to check out what was said in classrooms might violate the First Amendment right of free speech.

Nonetheless, given the current makeup of the U.S. Supreme Court, no one expects any widespread judicial clampdowns on informers soon.

Even so, jurors have been coming down on them like gangbusters. In a series of recent radical prosecutions, cases built on informers regularly fell apart. Defense lawyers energetically brought out the amounts of money paid to informers, or the pending charges against them. "The larger the obvious carrot prompting his testimony," says Northwestern Law Professor Jon R. Waltz, "the less likely jurors are to believe an informer." Such near-unanimous juror disbelief suggests that there is at least a pragmatic limit on informers. If law-enforcement agencies do not cut back on the infiltration of informers into political movements, the continued surfacing of the likes of Sara Jane Moore may bring broad new restrictions--even on those informers who are vital to run-of-the-mill criminal investigation.

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