Confidential informants have long been the grease that helps the criminal justice system keep churning.
They make up the underbelly of the drug world, the “little fish” used by police and prosecutors to catch the “big fish.” Or that is the theory, anyway.
Modern policing may have changed, but not this artifact of the ‘70s-era War on Drugs. The use of confidential informants is a black hole in the criminal justice system that has prosecutors and court officials falling in line to rubber stamp search warrants and pursue cases built on the words an anonymous informant whispered to a police officer. And, as the Globe Spotlight Team has shown in its recent Snitch City series, the system rests heavily on both informants with good reasons to lie and cops who have themselves been accused of lying.
One such case involved a search warrant originated by Boston police officer Jeffrey Cahill, in which Cahill swore he had watched a confidential informant repeatedly buy crack from a man in a black Honda Accord. A defense attorney produced proof that the car was in the shop on the days Cahill swore he watched the drug buys. A judge tossed the case, and reprimanded the Suffolk County prosecutor who signed off on the warrant for “egregious” conduct in approving the warrant in the first place.
Cahill remains on the force. A Boston Police Department spokesperson said the department examined the case and found “no wrong doing” by Cahill.
In fact, the records relating to the Cahill warrant are among a number requested by the Globe from the Boston Police Department this year as part of a public records request relating to the use of confidential informants — including such basic information as how many people are registered by the department as confidential informants (names redacted, of course) and how much public money has been spent over the last several years to compensate them.
Despite subsequent orders from the state’s Supervisor of Public Records directing the BPD to comply, it has not and so last May the Globe sued in an effort to obtain those records in the face of its “serial noncompliance.”
Sergeant Detective John Boyle, a BPD spokesperson, has insisted that the department cannot comply because it has no central database for such records, although its policy manual indicates it does.
BPD has even stonewalled on records related to one suspected informant, Michael W. White, a drug dealer who died in 2002, but who had played a role in the wrongful conviction that sent a Fall River man, Shaun Jenkins, to prison for nearly 19 years until he was released in 2021. A lawsuit filed on Jenkins’ behalf alleges BPD paid two key witnesses $100 each in 2002 to implicate Jenkins in his cousin’s death.
So, yes, the more things change ...
A Globe analysis of more than 2,000 search warrants issued over three years across Massachusetts, including Boston, Worcester, and Springfield, found 9 out of 10 drug raids were carried out on the word of confidential informants whose identities are known only to police. Most of those — 4 out of 5 — hinged on the word of a single unnamed source.
The analysis also found that only three of those 2,000 warrant applications were rejected by the clerk-magistrates who reviewed them. That’s a 99.8 percent success rate for police.
Now and then, especially when a case reaches the appellate court level, confidential informants and the police who depend on them encounter a more skeptical audience. When Appeals Court Justice Andrew M. D’Angelo inquired of Assistant Suffolk District Attorney Brooke Hartley whether Boston police had actually refused to identify the confidential informant who was key to a fentanyl bust, she conceded she had never seen the informant’s file.
“For all the Commonwealth knows, this police officer made the entire thing up [and] there is no confidential informant,” D’Angelo said.
Prosecutors ultimately dropped the case — a not uncommon occurrence when an informant is called into question.
Prosecutors have dropped at least three cases involving search warrants obtained by now-BPD Sergeant Detective Eric Merner where the information was attributed to unnamed informants. A defense attorney is quoted in court records accusing Merner of using “nearly verbatim” language attributed to those informants in otherwise unrelated cases.
Merner’s search warrants are among those to which BPD has denied the Globe access.
Boston of all cities surely should have learned its lesson years ago about the consequences of police and prosecutorial misconduct. Between 2020 and 2021, more than a dozen men convicted during the 1980s and 1990s due to police or prosecutorial misconduct (or both) were exonerated.
Thirty or 40 years ago, the crime rate was high, much of it fueled by drugs and gangs, and not a lot of questions were asked: When cops produced a “suspect” backed up by “evidence” volunteered by an informant, well, that cop was a hero.
Times have changed. Crime is down, as Boston’s mayor has proudly cheered. And it’s time Boston police used this moment to rethink how business is done and how officers are held accountable. Lying in the line of duty isn’t acceptable — and neither is an opaque system that protects those who do.
Editorials represent the views of the Boston Globe Editorial Board. Follow us @GlobeOpinion.