Watered-Down Jail Informant Bill Approved by Assembly Panel

SACRAMENTO —  A weakened version of legislation that would have drastically curtailed the use of jailhouse informants in California was approved by the Assembly Public Safety Committee on Tuesday after defense lawyers and prosecutors agreed to a compromise.

Key features of the bill include a requirement that judges routinely instruct jurors to view jailhouse informant testimony with caution, and a requirement that prosecutors tell an informant’s crime victims that he is being given leniency in return for his testimony against another criminal defendant.

Victim notifications are viewed as especially important by defense lawyers who see them as an indirect means of bringing pressure on prosecutors to refrain from using jailhouse informants. Such informants usually report confessions of other inmates to the authorities in return for favors. A number of informants have said that they know of cases in which confessions have been fabricated.

End of Bargaining Seen

“Once the first (informant’s) victims are notified,” predicted Los Angeles defense lawyer Gigi Gordon, “I think the victims’ rights people will stand up and do what we couldn’t do, and that is eliminate plea bargaining (for jailhouse informants), bail reductions, things like that.”

The legislation, which was drafted by defense lawyer groups and sponsored by Assemblyman Richard E. Floyd (D-Carson), was approved on a voice vote with no apparent opposition. It goes next to the Assembly floor. If it passes there, it goes to the Senate.

Defense lawyers, who had hoped for a much tougher bill, made a series of compromises to win the support of the California District Attorneys Assn. Without it, they were convinced that they would not receive the support of Assemblyman Gary Condit, a conservative Democrat from Ceres whom they counted as a swing vote on the committee.

In an effort to get the bill out of committee, they abandoned a push to ban prosecutors from giving an informant any benefit in return for testifying--settling instead for a requirement that the benefit be disclosed in court.

They also surrendered a requirement that prosecutors obtain corroboration for informants’ testimony, using standards similar to those adopted by Los Angeles County Dist. Atty. Ira Reiner late last year after a jailhouse informant scandal broke in his county.

Prosecutors around the state were unwilling to embrace defense arguments that their problems were similar to those that have surfaced in Los Angeles and that, therefore, they too needed a tough corroboration standard.

In an unsuccessful effort to win the prosecutors’ support, the defense bar agreed to the lesser standard that many prosecutors say they already use to corroborate an informant’s account. Under this standard, an informant is held to be credible when he produces information known only to the criminal and the police.

The validity of this standard presupposes that police are honest and do not pass inside information to an informant, and that an informant is not cagey enough to get inside information from the authorities through inadvertent leaks or other ways.

Veteran jailhouse informant Leslie Vernon White demonstrated one other way last fall. As Los Angeles County sheriff’s investigators observed, he picked up a jailhouse telephone and, impersonating various law enforcement personnel, was able to obtain enough inside information to frame an inmate he had never met.

It was his demonstration that prompted Reiner to issue his guidelines and to concentrate authority for approving the use of informants among a small group of high-level officials within his office, rather than leaving the decisions up to any of the office’s 800 prosecutors, which had long been the practice.

In addition, a grand jury probe has been launched into how law enforcement in Los Angeles has used informants.