Casting Doubt on Informant Testimony
It is easy to say, from your current position, that you would never act as a police informant, but it is less easy to know what you would do if the prosecutors had an informant lined up to testify at your trial about what you said to him about illegal drugs, plus a recording of your conversation, and a guilty verdict from the jury would mean a decade or more in prison. More than 90 percent of defendants in federal and state criminal cases take plea deals, but what you have to do to get the plea deal varies according to your charges and according to how useful your testimony could be in pending investigations. Sometimes all the state wants you to do is plead guilty, and you will get a sentence on the low end of the sentencing range; for some offenses, that means that you will never set foot inside a prison. These plea deals exist because the time and money spent on criminal trials are scarce resources, and your guilty plea and probation sentence are less costly to taxpayers than your trial and prison sentence would be. If the state needs your cooperation to solve an ongoing investigation or build its case against another defendant, it may offer you a sweet deal in exchange for your help, such as downgrading your charges so that you only get probation when, if convicted of your original charges, you could have spent decades behind bars. You might have to testify against other defendants, though, or even participate in an undercover operation as a confidential informant. Here, our Miami drug crimes defense lawyer explains the tumultuous relationship between a longtime informant and federal law enforcement, and how this might apply in less dramatic cases, like yours.
But He Snitches On Everyone
Prosecutors often call former accomplices as witnesses at a defendant’s trial. By nature, no snitch is a witness of unimpeachable character. Every witness who testifies against a co-defendant has a self-interested motive for doing so, even if he is responding to lawyers’ questions with the whole truth and nothing but the truth. You may be able to cast doubt on the credibility of the testimony by drawing attention to the ulterior motives of the witness, especially if the witness has testified against multiple other defendants.
The Rise and Fall of Boliche
If anyone was a career informant, it was Jorge Hernandez, also known by his nickname Boliche, which means “bowling ball” in Spanish. His drug trafficking career began when he was young, and by 2000, the least bad option for him was to surrender to law enforcement while on the run from former accomplices in Venezuela. The DEA eagerly recruited him as an informant, since he knew so much about so many international drug dealing operations. The information he provided in his capacity as an informant led to the interception of many shipments of cocaine throughout the Americas and the arrest of many suspected drug dealers.
The DEA dismissed Hernandez from his role as an informant in 2008, after the DEA found evidence that he had been extorting money from other informants by threatening to tell their former accomplices that they were informants. Later, the DEA renewed its relationship with Hernandez, because he had so much inside information. This time, they needed him to reveal what he knew about misconduct by other DEA employees, which he did. Hernandez later faced new charges in 2023 for extorting money from defendants in pending drug trafficking cases by claiming that he could help them get plea deals by which they would serve their sentences in conditions similar to house arrest.
There Can Be Reasonable Doubt About the Credibility of Informants
Not every informant has a backstory that practically writes itself into the screenplay of a Netflix series, but every time an informant testifies at a criminal trial, there is more to the story than what the informant says in response to the prosecutor’s questions. Through your lawyer’s cross-examination of the informant, or by summoning another witness or presenting other evidence, you might be able to make the jury doubt that the accusations against you are true, and if you do this successfully, the jury must acquit you.
Contact Our Criminal Defense Attorneys
A South Florida criminal defense lawyer can help you seek justice if you were charged with drug crimes, and the prosecution intends to summon an informant to testify against you at your trial. Contact Ratzan & Faccidomo in Miami, Florida for a confidential consultation about your case.
Source:
cbs42.com/news/politics/ap-politics/ap-longtime-dea-informant-charged-in-alleged-scheme-to-extort-high-level-cocaine-traffickers/
