Opinion ID: 4211658
Heading Depth: 3
Heading Rank: 1

Heading: The Scandal

Text: Six years after Sanders’s trial, a scandal erupted in Los Angeles surrounding the use of jailhouse informants in criminal prosecutions. In October 1988, Leslie White demonstrated to the Los Angeles Sheriff’s Department how he and other informants had obtained information “about defendants they had never met” to fabricate claims that they 12 Stewart pleaded guilty to four counts of first-degree murder in February 1983. She was sentenced to four concurrent terms of life with the possibility of parole. A jury found Freeman guilty of four counts of first-degree murder with special circumstances in December 1983. Freeman’s first penalty-phase trial ended in a hung jury; in March 1985, the second jury returned a verdict of life without the possibility of parole. 18 SANDERS V. CULLEN heard confessions while in jail. Gonzalez v. Wong, 667 F.3d 965, 1004 (9th Cir. 2011) (W. Fletcher, J., concurring in part). White explained that he was one of several prisoners who gave bogus testimony about such confessions in order to get better deals in their own cases, and for other privileges. Id. at 1005 (9th Cir. 2011). A grand jury was empaneled to look into the improper use of informant testimony by the Los Angeles County District Attorney’s Office. Id. The grand jury issued a 150-page report painting “a harrowing picture of the role of jailhouse informants in the Los Angeles County criminal justice system during this period” and noted the “appalling number of instances of perjury or other falsifications to law enforcement” by informants. Id. at 1005–06. The report found that informants were given numerous benefits for their fabricated confessions, such as being transferred to jails perceived to be more desirable. Id. at 1007. The District Attorney’s Office reviewed all cases from the previous ten years in which: (1) a jailhouse informant testified as a witness for the State “at a preliminary hearing or trial to admissions or confessions made by a defendant to the informant while the informant and the defendant were in custody together;” or (2) Leslie White testified as a witness for the State on any subject matter. Leslie White did not testify at Sanders’s trial, but he was romantically linked to one of the eyewitnesses who did, Tami Rogoway.