Episode Three: Blown Cover

When LeBron Gaither was he got into an altercation with a staff member at his school that resulted in assault charges As Gaither faced the possibility of a criminal record a Kentucky State Police detective offered him a deal Charges would go away if Gaither agreed to become a drug informant At the time such an agreement was illegal without consent from Gaither s parents or guardian But Gaither agreed In Gaither s body was determined in the woods Gaither had helped police build a occurrence against a local drug dealer and a grand jury member had tipped off the dealer that Gaither had testified against him An autopsy revealed Gaither had been tortured before he was murdered This episode revisits Gaither s event and others in which police were reckless and careless with the lives of those they pressured to become informants Transcript Radley Balko On a Monday morning in July police officers escorted LeBron Gaither through the courthouse in Marion County Kentucky It was an odd place for the -year-old to be LeBron wasn t in court to answer for several crime he had committed Instead he d come to court to tell a grand jury about a cocaine purchase he had helped arrange The following day July LeBron was back in court this time in neighboring Taylor County Again he narrated a grand jury about a drug sale that he had helped arrange LeBron it turns out had been working as a confidential informant for the Kentucky State Police But even for an informant his appearance in court was unique Informants almost never testify in front of grand juries Their identities are supposed to be kept secret Until that week no one other than a limited police officers knew LeBron was working with the cops not even his own family Shawn Gaither We were never even described that he was going to even attempt to be an informant or they were going to use him as an informant Radley Balko That s Shawn Gaither LeBron s older brother Shawn Gaither We as a family would have absolutely narrated him no you re not doing this Radley Balko In fact LeBron Gaither had been working with the police for almost a year And it was a lopsided arrangement It all began when he had an altercation with an administrator that resulted in the school calling the police In exchange for declining to charge him with assault the cops requested if he d become an informant instead It would be dangerous work LeBron hadn t yet turned and no one in law enforcement talked to his parents before recruiting him Shawn Gaither I think he just wasn t educated enough to know the danger that he was truly putting himself in nor do I think that those dangers were explained to him Radley Balko The single majority of key responsibility police have when dealing with informants is to make sure their cover isn t blown It s why courts defer to police when they rely on an informant s word to obtain search and arrest warrants without ever identifying the informant by name Yet that week in July the police marched LeBron through two courthouses and had him testify in front of two separate grand juries with no effort to conceal his face or his identity One of the Taylor County jurors recognized LeBron She tipped off her friend Jason Noel a drug dealer who was already facing charges Noel knew LeBron and as you might imagine he was angry The very next day LeBron Gaither s police contacts picked him up outfitted him with a recorder and a transmitter and set him up to make yet another drug purchase It was Wednesday July The target this time Jason Noel Shawn Gaither They were going to set up one more drug buy that was going to end in a bust He was supposed to walk up to Jason s car Apparently law enforcement was around the area but in undercover vehicles And the minute that he had the drugs in hand his words were supposed to be This looks good And law enforcement was going to swarm in arrest him arrest Jason and anybody else that was in the car When my brother leaned into the car there was a gentleman in the back seat that he didn t know was in the back seat Jason advised him to come around to the client side get in so that they could do the transaction My brother did And then the car drove off Radley Balko The police tried to follow the car but eventually lost track of it They never saw LeBron Gaither alive again Sarah Stillman To be an informant is a very very dangerous thing to do Alexandra Natapoff Exposing the identity of an informant in a general courtroom colloquially known as burning an informant in other words revealing their identity and then using them again was such an obvious breach of care was such an obvious part of informant use rules Radley Balko From The Intercept this is Collateral Damage I m Radley Balko I m an investigative journalist who has been covering the drug war and the criminal justice system for more than years In this series we ve been telling the stories of people who needlessly died in the war on drugs LeBron Gaither is one of them LeBron didn t sell buy or use drugs before he became an informant He just needed a way to stay out of legal trouble He trusted the police to protect him And he s not the only one Sarah Stillman Kids are being used as informants People with serious addictions are being used as informants People with mental robustness and disability issues are being used in approaches that strike me as grossly and patently dangerous and often results in injury or death Alexandra Natapoff Sometimes people are shocked at how cavalier our criminal system is about the lives and the well-being of informants and they say How can this be How do we permit this One of the answers to that question is that the law permits it Radley Balko The modern war on drugs dates back to the Nixon administration half a century ago In that time the United States has produced laws and policies ensuring that collateral damage isn t just tolerated it s inevitable Confidential informants like LeBron Gaither are seen by our criminal justice system as expendable The police are permitted to use vague unenforceable promises to lure them into dangerous situations they aren t prepared to handle sometimes with money but often with the assurance of clearing their records They rarely end up better off than they were before when they started working with police They re solicited to interact with dangerous people but without weapons or training And with no real oversight police can dangle promises of a clean record in exchange for cooperation then repeatedly renege on their word until the informant agrees to help with additional cases And because this work is all done in secret their stories are rarely notified This is Episode Three Blown Cover The Preventable Murder of LeBron Gaither Shawn Gaither So I am Shawn Gaither My relationship to LeBron is I m his oldest brother Wherever I went he was with me We loved to play basketball as kids We had a lot of good friends We pretty much spent most of of our childhood together Where there was one there was the other Radley Balko The Gaither brothers were big sports fans especially football They went to church together and leaned on one another during a childhood that at times could be challenging Shawn Gaither We lived in New York for several years and then we moved to Kentucky when I was And so when we moved to Kentucky my mom decided that she didn t really want to come to Kentucky So my grandmother took custody of us and she raised us as if we were her own kids So our grandmother had us until we were and And when mom came back she got custody of us Radley Balko The Gaithers mother arrived in Kentucky during a challenging time for any kid their adolescence She settled one county over from where they lived with their grandmother But Shawn Gaither didn t want to move It would have meant leaving his friends and his school So he decided to stay behind and live with his aunt He and LeBron remained close and in the years that followed he saw his brother struggle with the challenges of living with an addicted parent When LeBron was in high school he had an altercation with a faculty member that would put him in the hands of the cops and ultimately lead to his death Shawn Gaither So the story we got was that one day the assistant principal Charles Lampley was going around talking to all the classes about students disrespecting teachers and how the school was going to handle that going forward My understanding through his tutor and his classmates when the assistant principal was talking my brother raised his hand and declared I got a question And based on what I know is that his question was Well what happens when teachers are disrespectful towards students and the trainee s not being disrespectful There s a couple of stories that happened after that Allegedly he got up and was advised to go to the office by the assistant principal and that he would talk to him about it later The first story was that when he walked past the assistant principal he shoved him The assistant principal fell and ended up current his hip And then the second story we got was that when he went to leave the classroom he declared something The assistant principal stepped in front of him but tripped over my brother s feet and fell So to know exactly what happened it would be listening to third and fourth parties to try to figure out what exactly happened Ultimately the assistant principal did break his hip There s no denying that Radley Balko As Shawn Gaither notes accounts of the happening differ The Louisville Courier Journal shared LeBron Gaither punched the assistant principal in the jaw causing him to fall and break his hip Shawn Gaither They apparently took him to the police station that day And whatever conversations happened at the police station happened To this day I still don t know what those conversations were Obviously it led to what he ultimately started doing for the law enforcement Radley Balko LeBron was expelled from school following the alleged assault He was later arrested for brandishing a gun during a dispute Sarah Stillman Kids can be caught up in something that happened on the spur of the moment and they re facing a drug charge And then on the spot they suddenly have this way out of it Radley Balko That s Sarah Stillman a staff writer at the New Yorker who s written at length about how young people are baited into working as informants in the war on drugs Sarah Stillman And so I could imagine to anyone that would be very appealing But especially if you re a young person who doesn t fully understand the legal system and you think that there s a way out for you the cops are providing you a way out and so you take it Radley Balko For her award-winning examination in the New Yorker Stillman interviewed more than people several of whom had once worked as informants themselves Sarah Stillman In countless of the interviews I did people had very good reasons that they felt vulnerable and that they were willing to take dangerous deals which included a young transgender woman who feared all the really scary things that could happen to her if she was incarcerated and put in a male facility where she did not identify as a male I think about kids who feared that they weren t going to graduate high school and their whole life was going to be derailed by what could have been a minor drug charge but they were advised that if they didn t do this that they could face really serious repercussions Radley Balko LeBron Gaither was facing assault charges Shawn Gaither They informed him he was going to do years in prison for assaulting a principal Now being that he was I m assuming at the time maybe getting ready to turn I don t know how you could tell a kid that they re going to do that amount of time when there s conflicting stories of what truly took place Radley Balko Just a quick aside here Not all of the details that Shawn Gaither recalls from his brother s matter match up with police court and media records That s entirely understandable The events in this development happened nearly years ago and human memory is fallible We also know that police can be deceptive about how they work with informants and the secrecy and lack of oversight make it hard to verify police reports Shawn says police made his brother promises they could never have kept like arranging a scholarship so he could play college football But he also admits that police have denied that LeBron was ever threatened with years in prison or that they made any such promises to his brother What is clear is that police first approached LeBron after the altercation at his school that they required him to consider working as an informant after he turned and that he agreed It s also undisputed that he was paid for that work Fred Capps You recall when it was that you started working more closely with LeBron Danny Burton Wasn t long after his th birthday that we got together Radley Balko That s Detective Danny Burton testifying at the murder trial of Jason Noel in We ll play excerpts from his trial throughout this episode and apologies if the -year-old recording is a little scratchy Here Detective Burton describes how he first began using LeBron to make drug busts Fred Capps So you dealt with him as a paid informant Danny Burton That s correct Fred Capps On the same basis as you stated earlier there was state police agenda to pay informants for felony cases they assisted with and for misdemeanor cases they assisted with Danny Burton Yes Radley Balko In the roughly months LeBron worked as a paid informant he earned more than If the pay Burton described is accurate it means LeBron worked at least cases and possibly as various as Shawn Gaither My brother went into this absolutely green He had no history of buying drugs Radley Balko Looking back Shawn says there were at least specific clues about what was going on Shawn Gaither I remember the day my grandma called me and declared Do you know who this gentleman is that your brother keeps getting in the car with that drives a red Dodge Viper I m like I have no clue who that is I remember a week or so after that he and I had a conversation and I appealed I revealed Who is this guy He goes Oh it s just somebody I know Radley Balko The red Dodge coming by the house was indeed a Stealth not a Viper The police had seized it from an alleged drug offender Detective Burton got to drive it as his work car Danny Burton I would get with LeBron We would get together I would pick him up If he was going to a certain area I would get him as close as I could without trying to expose myself And he would exit my conveyance and walk or he would go to a payphone and call individuals that would be doing business And he would tell them where he would be They would come to him He would get into a carriage with them do the transaction And then he would come up with a reason that he needed to be at a mini mart or a prearranged place where he knew I would be and get close as he could and then he would walk to me when the transaction was over with Radley Balko On the afternoon of July Burton ran through the latest plan with LeBron This time the target of the sting Jason Noel knew LeBron was working with the cops That s thanks to the tip from his friend who happened to be on the grand jury John Niland Now in the two and a half or almost three years at that point of work that you had done in undercover enforcement did you ever had an informant testify before a grand jury before Danny Burton No John Niland And the reason that in fact it was something that you thought was a bad idea Would you agree Danny Burton I didn t like the idea John Niland And the reason that it is not a good idea is because the cover of an undercover informant then is blown at that point or possibly Danny Burton Everyone on the grand jury knows who it is yes John Niland And everyone in the grand jury and then perhaps everyone who is in the courthouse that may be involved in any type of drug activity Danny Burton There s dependably the possibility of whoever s in the courthouse could see and find out yes Radley Balko It wasn t Detective Burton s decision to have LeBron testify But it was up to him and his club whether to put LeBron back out in the streets the very next day And if he knew the danger there was real that LeBron s cover had been blown that decision put LeBron in quite a bit more danger than usual The bust was supposed to happen at a grocery store called Nolley s Here s Detective Tim Simpson describing the plan Tim Simpson Mr Noel was to bring specific cocaine approximately half ounce to meet Mr Gaither at Nolley s Food Mart on Fred Capps And on behalf of the state police in your mind as you were assisting in the preparation of that how is that to go down or to occur there at the food mart Tim Simpson It was going to be a what we refer to as a buy bust Mr Gaither was to ask to see the dope Once it was shown to him he was going to give us a signal to come in and arrest Mr Noel on the scene Radley Balko LeBron was outfitted with a transmitter hidden inside a fake pager clipped to his side Keep in mind that this was Cellphones were rare and pagers were pretty common LeBron and his handlers agreed on a signal he d give after he d completed the purchase He d say the phrase This looks good which would signal to officers to confront and arrest Noel once he had dropped LeBron off The police also had a plan to block Noel s car if it appeared he was trying to escape But it all escalated too hastily As soon as LeBron got in the front seat and closed the door Noel s car sped away The police gave chase for a bit but lost sight of the car around p m They also lost signal from the transmitter Jason Noel drove LeBron to a farm owned by his uncle And they weren t alone The account of what happened next was detailed in court by several of Noel s accomplices This is Lamont Battee whose nickname is Smoke He was in the backseat of Noel s car when they picked up LeBron Lamont Battee We all got out of the car you know we was talking to LeBron and he had a pager or something I stated Let me see that man Ya know it s a funny-looking pager I ve never seen one like it before Radley Balko Suspecting it was fake and a few sort of wire Jason Noel required LeBron for the phone number of his pager Gregory Scott Lyons Jason was he was I couldn t say he was mad he was a little angry Radley Balko That s Gregory Scott Lyons another friend of Noel s who arrived at the farm shortly after LeBron Gregory Scott Lyons He was angry at LeBron Fred Capps How do you know that Gregory Scott Lyons Cause you could just tell the way he was acting when he kept on trying to get into the fight with Smoke and LeBron Fred Capps What was he saying to LeBron Gregory Scott Lyons He recounted him something that several woman had notified him that he had narced on him Radley Balko There was specific arguing and then LeBron and Battee broke out into a fistfight about a thoroughly separate issue Then everyone but LeBron and Noel walked to a car to leave As they did they heard a gunshot Here s Lyons testifying at Noel s trial Fred Capps And as you were leaving you heard a shot Gregory Scott Lyons Yes sir I did Fred Capps Does that mean you were in your car Gregory Scott Lyons I was right to my car My back was turned and I was headed to my car and I was just about to get in my car Fred Capps You heard a shot Gregory Scott Lyons Yes sir I did Fred Capps What did you do about that Gregory Scott Lyons I turned around Fred Capps And Gregory Scott Lyons And I heard LeBron say why d you shoot me Radley Balko Lyons and the others then drove away leaving Noel and LeBron alone Meanwhile after losing signal on the transmitter LeBron s handlers with the Kentucky State Police split up and combed the area searching for Noel s car or for various sign of LeBron Shawn Gaither This is tough for me because one of the statements that he was instructed to make that if anything was looking bad he was supposed to say I wish my brother was here And that was going to be their cue to rush in and stop the transaction Radley Balko We ll never know whether LeBron was calling out for his brother in the moments before he died Police would later say they never heard LeBron use that phrase over the wire If he did it would have been after he was out of range Sarah Stillman To think of this child this kid this young person saying that and no one being there at the other end of the line to hear him or stop the dangerous operation that was already ensuing and to think of him being brutally tortured and killed as a effect when this is the deal that he d struck just that s dependably going to stay with me Radley Balko Sarah Stillman says the situation LeBron ascertained himself in was entirely foreseeable given the way informants are generally treated Sarah Stillman This is a shockingly underregulated space Young people or just people in general wind up in dangerous situations that spiral out of control and don t know how to get out of it because they re operating with forces that have tremendous power over them specifically law enforcement Police could choose to do the work themselves but instead they outsource it to vulnerable people who are often on the hook in particular way including to kids to teenagers Radley Balko After the break the police search for LeBron and Jason Noel Police could choose to do the work themselves but instead they outsource it to vulnerable people who are often on the hook in selected way including to kids to teenagers Break Radley Balko The police wouldn t track down Jason Noel s car until later that evening They stopped him LeBron was nowhere to be identified They questioned Noel and eventually arrested him According to court records when LeBron s body was revealed he appeared to have been tortured Shawn Gaither I was working at McDonald s I ll never forget it Just like any other day I got a phone call around o clock I was gonna get off work It was my grandma and she stated Hey I m hearing that something happened to your brother I commented Well he s got a lot of friends over there that somebody would have contacted me by now We as his family had no knowledge of him being a drug informant until after the detectives came and spoke to us at my aunt s house Radley Balko The situation at the school the money and the alleged promises likely all induced LeBron Gaither to work with police But he may also have been motivated by specific other very personal reasons Shawn Gaither My brother was in pain because of what my mom was doing There was no secret Mom was into drugs And we find out later through selected hearings that he required to get back and this is their words he wished to get back at the people that were selling drugs that was causing his mom to be the way she was Radley Balko Shawn also says their mother wouldn t have supported LeBron s decision to work with the police Shawn Gaither She would have much rather him dealt with the consequences of having to go to court and deal with the outcome of whatever that was before she would ever want her son to be a drug informant Radley Balko Jason Noel was tried convicted and sentenced to years to life for the murder of LeBron Gaither Three other men at the farm that day received sentences between and years The grand jury member who tipped off Noel received years on various charges But the police officers who put LeBron in danger who blew his cover even though they should have known better they were never punished But the police officers who put LeBron in danger who blew his cover even though they should have known better they were never punished Shawn Gaither This was just pretty much poor police work is what it boiled down to Radley Balko The Gaither family sued the Kentucky State Police arguing that LeBron s handlers had a duty to protect him and that they were negligent in their failure to do so Shawn Gaither Our attorney that was one of his very first questions is When did this become protocol that we would bring drug informants in front of people in a full courtroom to testify against someone that they bought drugs off of in order to get prosecution It s not done That basically was the premise of all of our issues is that they put him out there to be identified which ultimately led to his death Radley Balko But LeBron Gaither isn t the only victim of the informant system because the informant system was never designed with the interest or safety informants in mind It s a tool whose sole purpose is to help police accumulate arrests The informant system was never designed with the interest or safety informants in mind It s a tool whose sole purpose is to help police accumulate arrests Alexandra Natapoff A key aspect of understanding how the informant region works and how American law permits informants to be used to be created to be rewarded to be pressured is to recognize that the arena is almost entirely unregulated Radley Balko Alexandra Natapoff is a Harvard Law professor criminal justice expert and author of the book Snitching Criminal Informants and the Erosion of American Justice Alexandra Natapoff American law imposes I want to say almost no constraints and that s putting it generously on police and prosecutors when they decide to pressure someone into becoming an informant or promise rewards to someone becoming an informant And the law itself provides almost no guard rails or oversight to that process We in effect confer enormous nearly unfettered and often highly secretive discretion on police and then on prosecutors in the decisions about how to create and reward an informant Radley Balko Natapoff says police have inevitably used informants especially in organized crime cases But it became far more common in the modern war on drugs As with numerous drug war policies police began using informants because drug crimes are consensual meaning there s no unwilling victim to statement them So in order to enforce these laws the police have to help break them They have to become part of a drug transaction either undercover or through the use of informants Alexandra Natapoff Informant use is one of those great terrible examples maybe one of the the greater part pithy examples of how the American criminal system dehumanizes the people who pass through it People become instruments And it s so visible in the informant sphere because we can see exactly what it is that the executive is using people for risking their well-being for even risking their lives And then we see police and prosecutors behave in conformity with this idea that people are disposable that they have become tools in an analysis of crime that their own well-being that their own lives are not something that the state demands to protect Radley Balko Natopoff says that for the greater part law enforcement agencies there are no rules as to what police and prosecutors can demand or offer The agreements with informants are often vague and there are no requirements to keep track of how or how a large number of drug informants are used Alexandra Natapoff This values of secrecy is one of the great destructive aspects of informant use more generally American law is very poorly designed in order to combat it because American law and constitutional criminal procedure in particular is a little bit old school on this front because it assumes that there s going to be a trial And if in fact there were a trial in all these informant cases then we would learn certainly the identity of the informant We would learn theoretically the rewards that they were given how a large number of cases they operated in previously what their histories and backgrounds were In those rare cases where defendants go to trial they are entitled to all kinds of disclosure about bystanders that are used against them And the two big problems with this model are the small complication which is unfortunately in the realm of informants we have also too often seen that the establishment does not authentically in fact disclose the information that it is constitutionally obligated to disclose They don t certainly tell us everything they know about their informants Sometimes police don t tell prosecutors about informants so that that information will not be disclosed There are all kinds of workarounds for our transparency rules Radley Balko But according to Natapoff there s an even bigger issue that makes the just use of informants practically impossible Alexandra Natapoff We almost never go to trial We almost never trigger the mechanism that is designed to produce accountability transparency and information about the informants the establishment is using And because we permit all these deals and arrangements essentially to take place off the record in techniques that will never show up at a trial and never be tested in a courtroom we have consigned ourselves as it were to this enormous secretive world of deals of violence of crime of vulnerability that the general will almost never learn about We have consigned ourselves as it were to this enormous secretive world of deals of violence of crime of vulnerability that the community will almost never learn about Radley Balko According to Natapoff the challenge is that our entire criminal legal system is structured not on guilt innocence or accountability but on gaining leverage and cutting deals Alexandra Natapoff Ninety-five percent of all criminal convictions in this country are the product not of a trial not of a testing of evidence but of a deal of a plea Radley Balko And an informant s agreement is essentially a plea bargain but without judicial supervision Alexandra Natapoff We use all kinds of terms for informants cooperators snitches confidential informants compensated criminal spectators but it boils down to one core feature which is the deal That we have authorized the ruling body through the criminal system to barter and negotiate over guilt in exchange for information And we don t regulate that deal We have authorized the cabinet through the criminal system to barter and negotiate over guilt in exchange for information We in effect have created an enormous deregulated marketplace for guilt and information in which the authorities can pressure almost anyone or reward almost anyone for anything it wants in exchange for almost anything that it is willing to offer Radley Balko In the development of LeBron Gaither the deal was a little money along with alleged promises for leniency in his own matter or maybe a college scholarship in exchange for extremely dangerous undercover work Shawn Gaither There s no training for this They don t understand the rules of going to buy drugs from someone and the dangers that they put themselves in and things like that Even though they re wearing devices none of that really matters They don t pack weapons to protect themselves They are at the mercy of the people that are supposed to be watching over them Sarah Stillman It was amazing to me how multiple police forces relied upon people in unbelievably vulnerable situations to do a lot of their the bulk formidable policing And countless cops revealed to me straight up like We deeply need these folks to do the work we re doing Radley Balko Journalist Sarah Stillman has looked into how young people like LeBron Gaither end up in informant roles they re clearly unprepared for Sarah Stillman Almost every occurrence I ve looked at involving an informant the person is operating under a lot of constraints and pressures that tend to mean I don t think there is such a thing as informed consent when you re fearing the risks of entering a criminal legal system that so routinely subjects people to physical and sexual violence when incarcerated when you re dealing with people who have addictions when you re dealing with people who have mental robustness distress I don t really have an easy time imagining a landscape where even with more regulation people could really enter into this dangerous complicated work and be sufficiently protected Radley Balko In one circumstance Stillman wrote about a -year-old Washington state man named Jeremy McLean who started using pain medication after hurting his back on a construction job He agreed to become an informant after he was arrested for selling just eight methadone pills Sarah Stillman And Jeremy was put into a situation where he thought he d be done with it if he did a limited deals And then he did another deal and another deal and another deal And it s a small town It kept getting more and more and more unsafe until completely he was killed Radley Balko Stillman also wrote about Shelly Hilliard a -year-old in Detroit who was caught smoking marijuana then pressured into informing on a drug dealer Sarah Stillman Shelly was really really terrified of going to jail especially as a young trans woman And so she agreed to do this thing she knew was dangerous and didn t want to do but felt like she kind of had to do She called the dealer back but they couldn t really arrest the guy on the drug dealing charges because they didn t find him with drugs but he had a bunch of cash on him Due to civil asset forfeiture the cops were able to just take his cash and basically not account for it and just seize it and that was that and I believe genuinely disclosed to him who had set him up which was Shelly And soon thereafter he was enraged that he d lost all this money and very brutally murdered Shelly Radley Balko But it was the murder of Rachel Hoffman in Florida that generated media coverage general anger backlash and eventual calls for reforming how police use young informants Hoffman was young white and pretty Her death resonated with portions of the country that had been oblivious to deaths like LeBron s Note the tone in this review on her situation from ABC News Newscaster She could be anyone s daughter even yours Just out of college and caught with marijuana Newscaster But she did not get a slap on the wrist or jail time she got an offer from the police Sarah Stillman Rachel Hoffman was a -year-old latest college graduate in Tallahassee Radley Balko Police searched Hoffman s apartment after receiving a complaint of a marijuana smell and suspicious activity from her unit She allowed them to search Police Chief Dennis Jones We uncovered roughly a quarter pound of marijuana It was present during a search warrant Reporter If you were to hold that how much would that be Police Chief Dennis Jones A baggie Radley Balko The police claimed they also ascertained a handful of Valium and ecstasy ABC s pressed the police chief to specify just how much Police Chief Dennis Jones I think there were six pills Reporter Six pills Police Chief Dennis Jones Yes Reporter Is that a lot Police Chief Dennis Jones It s not a lot but it s it s enough to make it a felony Host Under Florida law Rachel Hoffman s six pills and the baggie of marijuana might have meant four years in state prison Liza Patty She was really scared They recounted her that she could go to jail for four or five years When you re that s that s an eternity Sarah Stillman And when she got caught the police basically commented You can go away to prison for a long time or you can become an informant come to work for us She agrees thinking like she indeed thought Oh maybe this will be an enthralling adventure She needed to like write a book about it Radley Balko If that sounds naive that s exactly the point Police rely on young people remaining oblivious to the exposure of what they re asking them to do Police rely on young people remaining oblivious to the vulnerability of what they re asking them to do Sarah Stillman The police set her up with a wire and sought her to go buy a large stash of cocaine I believe various ecstasy pills and a handgun Host Rachel called her mother on Passover to tell her she was going to be involved in a police sting Margie Weiss And I announced Are you kidding me Don t do it And I ll have to call your dad cause this is wrong This is very wrong And she explained Mom I don t want you telling anybody I don t want you to tell dad I don t want you to tell my lawyer I don t want you to tell the drug court because I m getting all my changes dropped so I can get out of drug court earlier Sarah Stillman And so she goes along to that deal and the police mentioned don t worry we ll be tracking we ll keep tabs and everything make sure that you re safe Instead the police lose track of her She gets there One of the guys sees the wire in her purse and shoots and kills her So this thing that she thought was going to be a simple way out for her wound up being basically a death sentence Radley Balko The outcry following Rachel Hoffman s death did indeed lead to several change In the Florida Legislature passed Rachel s Law which set particular basic guidelines for the use of confidential informants Among them Informants have to be communicated a reduction in their charges isn t guaranteed and they have the right to consult with an attorney Police working with informants have to be specifically trained And law enforcement agencies must develop written policies for working with informants But these would seem to be pretty ground-level regulations A scarce other states have followed suit Particular have passed laws saying minors can t be used as informants without parental permission Alexandra Natapoff I do think there are certain spaces of hope and they come because we ve started to see chosen pushback legislative pushback popular pushback journalistic pushback When I first started writing about this issue when I first published my book it s called Snitching back in there was not very much overhaul on the ground And by the time I published the second edition of the book just a couple of years ago more than half of all states had either considered or passed revision in this space Radley Balko Natapoff says more substantial amendment will only come once the general society understands the larger context in which informants are used First despite the fact that their proposes are used to obtain volatile search and arrest warrants informants aren t particularly reliable They tend to either be career criminals themselves desperate people in dire predicaments or both Then there s the matter of who these operations tend to target Alexandra Natapoff So there s this mythology and the justification for using informants that we use informants who are little fish to get big fish And that s why we need to accept this deal with the devil as it were because it s the only way we can work our way up the criminal food chain But it is a myth In fact we often reward big fish for turning in a bunch of little fish We reward arrest we reward bulk We reward as it were productivity which is not the same as rewarding populace safety We reward arrest we reward bulk We reward as it were productivity which is not the same as rewarding citizens safety which is not the same as rewarding going after the most of culpable And so we ve seen in the war on drugs in particular that the use of informants to generate low-level arrests even bad arrests as we ve seen in selected of the wrongful conviction cases It s an incentive for police and prosecutors to bulk up their numbers and sometimes even get additional funding and help for their work That s a terrible incentive It s an incentive to use the worst tools to get the worst outcomes Radley Balko As with much of the criminal justice system there are also racial disparities For example we know that though the rates of drug use and sales among Black and white people are roughly proportionate to the population police disproportionately arrest low-level drug dealers and users who are Black And to bust Black dealers there s an assumption among police that you need Black informants Shawn Gaither now works as a law enforcement officer himself as director of the Nelson County Kentucky call center But he too thinks these racial blinders are a big part of the reason why his brother was murdered Shawn Gaither I think they saw an opportunity for someone that was in the Black population to be a drug informant because everybody they went after was Black Jason was the only white guy that we ever determined out about that was not Black All the other people in Lebanon and in Campbellsville that he had bought drugs from were Black every single one of them So I believe they were targeting a specific demographic Radley Balko According to Sarah Stillman despite police promises that informant work can steer lives back on track it tends to have the opposite effect Sarah Stillman I saw people who were promised this could be a path to get out of criminality Instead it s kind of asking a young person to do the literal opposite I definitely talked to families where their loved one is struggling with an addiction They are trying to get out of it They are trying to break that pattern And then they re literally being sent into the same communities and situations that caused them to be immersed in their addiction So they re going back into a drug house They re going back into a social situation of the people who are selling to them So understandably that s not the easiest way to break an addiction to be sent back into a situation that s both dangerous and drug-infused Radley Balko Over time the ongoing use of informants can also make communities less trustful of police which makes it harder to solve crimes in those communities and thus makes them less safe Stop Snitching song plays Stop snitching Stop snitching Stop snitching Radley Balko The Stop Snitching movement which entered mainstream popular way of life in the last two decades began in part because of how police were using informants Alexandra Natapoff One of the first times I ever really met informant use the first time I really grappled with it was when I was working in Baltimore and as part of the community-based lawyering operation that I was in I was teaching classes in afterschool sessions and in church basements And I had the opportunity to talk to a lot of young people in Baltimore through these classes In one of these sessions one of the kids solicited me or I guess I should say one of the kids recounted me So police let drug dealers stay on the corner cause they re snitching Is that legal I mean can police do that They had gotten the message that justice was for sale When I got over the shock of having a -year-old explain to me how the criminal system worked on the ground I explained to him that yes veritably police do have discretion to permit a person committing crimes like drug dealing to remain at large if they re providing information And this child and his friends in the class they were disgusted They explained Well the police aren t doing their jobs and all you have to do is snitch and you can keep on dealing And it really struck me from their questions and their knowledge and their responses that they had gotten the message that justice was for sale Stop Snitching song plays Radley Balko As we mentioned earlier informants have long served as an fundamental tool in police investigations But the war on drugs has turned out to be a particularly poor fit for the tactic Sarah Stillman There s certainly situations where an informant allegedly can make a difference And there s likely a lot of white-collar crimes for instance where the tapes of informants have made a really big difference to being able to obtain accountability But I would argue in the drug war I m not seeing the cost-benefit analysis really making sense for our societal well-being Law enforcement uses this as such a consistent tool that allows them also to have other people do the majority of dangerous parts of their job Law enforcement uses this as such a consistent tool that allows them also to have other people do the bulk dangerous parts of their job Radley Balko It took over years for LeBron Gaither s family to be compensated for his death Despite blowing his cover and failing to protect him the state fought their lawsuit all the way to the Kentucky Supreme Court Shawn Gaither This thing dragged on for years years on years And then conclusively somebody explained you know what You were wrong and you owe this family this Radley Balko In the end LeBron s family only received about That s a paltry sum given how badly police erred in this incident And of discipline that money won t bring LeBron back I think he took what he thought was the easy road out Shawn Gaither We ll never know what he could have done what he would ve became So honestly and truly the money for me wasn t even I could have cared less if there wasn t money that came out of it And so I think he took what he thought was the easy road out And not knowing that the road he engaged in was way more complicated than what he presumably would experience if he had played this thing out in court Radley Balko As I mentioned Shawn Gaither now works in a police agency himself He s friends and colleagues with other police officers and when we spoke to him he was quick to differentiate the bulk everyday cops from the officers who put his brother in peril Still when it comes to his own son the lessons he learned from LeBron s death live on Shawn Gaither So my son got in trouble When he first turned he had particular marijuana in his car And the first thing that popped in my mind was Don t say a word I am on my way Because I refused to allow him to put himself in a situation over particular marijuana that my brother was in And so my advice to him was Don t say a word Don t answer no questions You ask for your attorney I will contact the attorney We are on our way Collateral Damage Podcast Collateral Damage Radley Balko Next time on Collateral Damage Tom Ballanco One of the party guests there was Peter McWilliams And he was very happy to share his role in all this that he and Todd were partners and they were gonna revolutionize patients access to cannabis Peter McWilliams Watching my normal run to the bathroom with one puff of marijuana turn into a meandering raid on the kitchen Donna Shalala We have a difficulty Increasing numbers of Americans believe that marijuana is not harmful Barry McCaffrey This is not medicine This is a Cheech and Chong show Peter McWilliams I am not going to rest until medicinal marijuana is available to every sick person who demands it in the United States Radley Balko Collateral Damage is a production of The Intercept It was disclosed and written by me Radley Balko Additional writing by Andrew Stelzer who also served as producer and editor Laura Flynn is our showrunner Ben Muessig is our editor-in-chief The executive producers are me and Sumi Aggarwal We had editing promotion from Maryam Saleh Truc Nguyen mixed our show Legal review by Shawn Musgrave and David Bralow Fact-checking by Kadal Jesuthasan Art direction by Fei Liu Illustrations by Tara Anand Copy editing by Nara Shin Social and video media by Chelsey B Coombs Special thanks to Peter Beck for research assistance This series was made manageable by a grant from the Vital Projects Fund If you want to send us a message email us at podcasts theintercept com To continue to follow my work and reporting check out my newsletter The Watch at radleybalko substack com Thank you for listening The post Episode Three Blown Cover appeared first on The Intercept