Federal prisoners used snitching for personal gain

[nervousone]

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.

[snip]

Before Watkins became an informant, he was a prolific armed robber.

In 1995, he held up a string of shops and restaurants, sometimes robbing the same place more than once, and sometimes pulling more than one robbery a day, according to court records. The last time he was arrested, in 2006, Atlanta police said he asked a supermarket clerk for a pack of cigarettes, stepped back, pulled a handgun and yelled "robbery." He fled before he got any money, employees caught him, and federal prosecutors hit him with a gun charge that could have put him in prison for the rest of his life.

By then, Watkins had been a federal informant for a decade, he said in a letter to USA TODAY. He claimed he once wore a wire inside a prison to help catch another man who was selling information to would-be witnesses. That man, Gregory Harris, later confessed, but, in an unusual move, the government agreed to halve the 20-year prison sentence Harris was already serving in exchange for his cooperation in other cases. (Harris was found dead this year inside the trunk of a burning car.)

And so began a career of trying to cash in on what he knew.

read the rest: http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2012/12/14/jailhouse-informants-for-sale/1762013/

 

[LogicSoDeveloped]

Wow. This doesn't surprise me at all. Cops aren't dumb but they definitely have their job done for them when snitching happens.

 

[sekio]

the government agreed to halve the 20-year prison sentence Harris was already serving in exchange for his cooperation in other cases. (Harris was found dead this year inside the trunk of a burning car.)

Snitches, stitches, ditches, etc.

 

[nowdubnvr6]

Being known as a snitch in prison isn't gonna work out for those guys too long. pieces of shit

 

[slimvictor]

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... The deals can chop a decade or more off of their sentences.

...though who knows what they might get chopped off of their bodies for being stitches.

 

[qwe]

this is another case of humans being predators of their own kind.

how can this be seen as anything but the most direct kind of fascism?

how can any court, claiming to have anything to do with "swearing on the bible" or any other moral authority, have any legitimacy when this happens?

i know the answer... money. i know the justification... public safety.

but this really just ends up costing more money and human lives in the long run, and it's corrosive to any fabric of trust and cooperation in any society... it's directly anti public safety and extremely costly on all measures, way beyond just financial cost.

 

[Captain.Heroin]

I rofl'd.

This is exactly why police should have to do THEIR OWN work, and not enable criminals to help them out! What kind of fucking shit is that? Lazy ass cunts can't even do THEIR work! Should be fired for that alone IMO.

 

[foolsgold]

sounds like that prison has a lot shiv sharpeners " what happens when the brotherhood grab you they use your ribs to sharpen their shiv's " in there that will be crying for their moms at night