Opinion ID: 76188
Heading Depth: 2
Heading Rank: 2

Heading: The use of Garnto as a confidential informant

Text: 26 Neither can we conclude that the decision to utilize Garnto as a confidential informant to make controlled drug purchases was so egregious as to establish a substantive due process violation. 7 27 Although Garnto had an extensive criminal history and a history of substance abuse, we cannot say that Defendants' use of Garnto as a confidential informant for controlled buys reflects such indifference to an extremely great risk to the safety of the public that this decision — when not viewed in hindsight with the results fully known — shocks the conscience. Collins, 112 S.Ct. at 1069-70 (noting that the Due Process Clause was intended to prevent government officials from abusing [their] power, or employing it as an instrument of oppression). 28 A government interest is advanced by using confidential informants. Combating unlawful drugs is a legitimate and important government function. Confidential informants can be helpful in this endeavor. Some confidential informants have blemishes on their own records which make them more acceptable to the criminal element on which they are to inform. The government cannot be expected to rely exclusively upon the virtuous in enforcing the law. See United States v. Richardson, 764 F.2d 1514, 1521 (11th Cir.1985); see also United States v. Simpson, 813 F.2d 1462, 1470 (9th Cir.1987) (It is unrealistic to expect law enforcement officers to ferret out criminals without the help of unsavory characters.). 29 Defendants did not authorize Garnto to perform his duties as a confidential informant while intoxicated. Instead, HCSO policy prohibited confidential informants from conducting drug purchases if they had been ingesting alcoholic beverages. Nothing in the record reflects that Defendants ever utilized Garnto — or anyone else — as a confidential informant when he had been drinking or under the influence of drugs, or that Garnto (before the fatal collision) had ever earlier shown up to perform his confidential informant duties while intoxicated. 30 Because Defendants' decision to use Garnto as a confidential informant did not present an extremely great risk that Garnto would cause a deadly automobile collision due to his intoxication, this decision does not present such an extraordinary circumstance that shocks the conscience in a way that amounts to a substantive due process violation. See McClendon, 305 F.3d at 326; Brown v. Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, Dept. of Health Emergency Med. Servs. Training Inst., 318 F.3d 473 479 (3d Cir.2003) (concluding that to state a civil rights claim the harm ultimately caused had to be foreseeable and fairly direct).