Factually! with Adam Conover - Snitching with Alexandra Natapoff

Episode Date: December 28, 2022

What exactly is a snitch, and why is the use of informants so corrosive to criminal justice? This week, Adam is joined by Alexandra Natapoff to talk about why the government cuts deals with informants, and how this practice lets the wealthy off the hook and puts marginalized people in harms’ way. Pick up a copy of Alexandra’s book at http://factuallypod.com/books Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

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So if all of that sounds good, if you want a big box of delicious snacks like this for yourself, use the code factually for $15 off your first order at Bokksu.com. That's code factually for $15 off your first order on Bokksu.com. I don't know the truth. I don't know the way. I don't know what to think. I don't know what to say. Yeah, but that's alright. Yeah, that's okay. I don't know anything. Hello and welcome to Factually. I'm Adam Conover. Thank you so much for joining me once again as I talk to an incredible expert about all the amazing shit that they know that I don't know and that you might not know. Both of our minds are going to get blown together and we are going to have a hell of a time doing it. Now once again, this is a YouTube episode of the show,

so if you're listening in audio form and you want to be watching the video, head to YouTube. If you're watching on YouTube and you want to listen to the show every week, search for Factually in your favorite podcast player and subscribe. And by the way, if you want to support the show, head to patreon.com slash adamconover for just five bucks a month. You get every episode of this podcast ad-free. You can join our community Discord. We even do a live book club over Zoom. It is so much fun. Hope to see you there. Patreon.com slash Adam Conover. Now, let's talk about this week's episode. One of the things that I'm best known for is debunking the tools that prosecutors and

cops use to convict criminals, or more often, the wrongfully accused. As it turns out, most of the tools you see on TV used by law enforcement are complete bullshit. Fingerprint analysis is flawed. Polygraph tests are complete pseudoscience. Arson investigations are often based on unscientific nonsense. Even eyewitness accounts are totally unreliable because people's memories can be and are manipulated by law enforcement on the reg. The same is even true when cops are interrogating suspects. They aren't there to find out what happened, they are there to try to coerce a confession.

And it turns out that the interrogation techniques commonly used put people under such psychological stress that they are actually a recipe for delivering false confessions. So when you add all of that together, our criminal justice system looks like not a dispassionate, objective, and scientific method to determine what happened in a crime. No, it looks like a recipe for police and prosecutors to railroad whoever they think did it, to point their finger at them, and to use a series of magic tricks to convince a judge and a jury that this person is guilty, whether or not they actually are.

And that is, to put it plainly, fucked up. Well, guess what? It gets even worse because there is one more hugely flawed, massively discriminatory, destructive tool that law enforcement uses that we have never even talked about on this show. It is the most commonly used tool in wrongfully decided death penalty cases, and that is the snitch. That's right, the rat, the stool pigeon, the informant. Not only does the system of informants and snitches, as practiced by law enforcement in America today, systematically produce wrongful convictions, it also operates completely in secret without sufficient government

oversight, it's wildly discriminatory, and it allows law enforcement to push people into doing crimes they would not have committed otherwise. It is really, really bad. And today on the show, we have the perfect guest to help us talk about it. On the show today, we have Alexandra Natapoff. She's a Harvard Law professor, she's a Guggenheim Fellow, and she's the author of Snitching, Criminal Enforcements, and the Erosion of American Justice,

a revised edition of which is out now. Please welcome to the show, Alexandra Natapoff. Alexandra, thank you so much for being on the show. Thank you so much for having me. So you have, it's not a new book, it's a book called Snitching that you wrote a number of years ago. There's a second edition that is out now.

Correct. All about informants and their role in the criminal justice system. As I talked about in the intro, we've covered on this show and on my prior work all the problems with other forms of what the cops and the prosecutors use to catch criminals. Crime scene investigation, arson investigations, eyewitness testimony, lots of structural problems in these. Informants is not something we've covered. Tell me about informants and why they are worthy of a book-length explanation. So informants are obviously a source of evidence,

just like a lineup, just like a fingerprint, just like a witness. But snitching is deeper than that just like a witness. But snitching is deeper than that. You can't really understand snitching in the U.S. criminal system unless you understand plea bargaining. So 95% of all the convictions in this country are the result of a plea. We almost never go to trial. We almost never litigate. We don't actually test the evidence in this country very often to take nothing away from the importance of good evidence. But mostly we deal. Mostly we negotiate. So this is when instead of going to trial, the prosecutor goes to the criminal or the accused criminal and their lawyer and says,

instead of going to trial where all the evidence would be tested, here's a deal. You can just go to prison for five years instead of 15 or whatever the deal is be tested. Here's a deal. You can just go to prison for five years instead of 15, which or whatever, whatever the deal is. It's correct. Yeah. Or and 95 percent of cases are determined this way. Ninety five percent of all convictions are the result of a deal. So the cases that end up in someone getting convicted of a crime are the result of a negotiation. So you mentioned a very famous wheeling and dealing in the world of a negotiation. So you mentioned very famous wheeling and dealing in the world of drug crimes, five years instead of 30, three years instead of 15,

but also you spent all weekend in jail, you can't go home to your family, you're being evicted. If you take a deal for time served for that loitering charge, you can go home. Millions of deals that look like that, just chump change deals in which people are pleading in order to get out of jail, pleading to avoid years of trouble and expense for their families. And then, of course, the very serious deals that you mentioned. So that's how we run American justice. And this is very different from how most people think that we do or it's how it's depicted on television where, OK, they have to assemble all the evidence and like prove it in front of a jury of your peers and the judge is banging the gavel and all that.

None of that happens in a plea deal. It's just the person forgoes their right to a trial and takes a punishment whether or not they actually did anything wrong. trial and takes a punishment whether or not they actually did anything wrong. And so it's funny, it's just this folk idea of how the criminal justice system works is the opposite of the reality of 95% of convictions are determined that way. So we have a lot of mythologies about our criminal system. One of them is that we go to trial, we test evidence that law matters, that evidence matters, that lawyering matters. But most of the time what matters is negotiation. And the resources and the status and the ability of a suspect to negotiate actually turns out to be incredibly powerful. Like imagine if 95 percent of Law & Order episodes never got to the second half of the show.

Or they were just like wheeling and dealing in a back room and you never saw the judge. show or they were just like wheeling and dealing in a back room and you never saw the judge. Well, the problem is that television tells us stories about the glamorous stuff, the interesting stuff. It's not fun or interesting or dramatic to watch the negotiation of a deal, except that it's how we run American justice and it is how most people will sustain a conviction in this country. Wow. So what role do informants play in that process? Yeah. So if you're reeling a little bit from the idea that we're running an enormous market in guilt, where 95% of all convictions are really the result of a negotiation, now imagine the off-the-books, under-the-table, black market version of that market.

And that is snitching. It means that anytime someone is arrested, someone becomes a suspect, somebody is in the lenses of investigators or the government or charged with a crime, there is always the potential that instead of going through a more formal lawyer process where they cut a deal or potentially go to trial, they cooperate. And then all bets are off. The rules disappear. Many of our classic rules, I told you there are a lot of mythologies about our criminal system, the rules about due process, about the Constitution, about lawyers, out the window. Almost anything goes, anything can be dealt, and anything can

be traded. And so the reason that I came back to write a second edition of this book, I started writing about this 13 years ago when we knew almost nothing, frankly, about this kind of clandestine off the books market. We know more now. There's been legislation. There's been some reform. There's been a. There's been some reform. There's been a lot of attention in the innocence movement to the wrongful convictions that flow. So we know a little bit more

about this enormous aspect of our criminal system that we almost never look at and we almost never think about. Yeah, it's kind of a weird thing just on the face of it when I try to come out. Obviously, I'm aware of the idea of an informant, again, mostly

from TV and movies, but the idea that cases would be decided or pleas would be done on the basis of someone else's... Well, tell me what we mean by this, by snitching. Describe for me a scenario where this

decides a case. So, let me back up two steps. Sure. An informant, a snitch is just someone who cuts a deal with the government, exchanging cooperation or information in exchange for some form of lenience. Maybe they don't get arrested at all, or maybe the prosecutor files fewer or less serious charges, or maybe they get a lower sentence. So the heart of informant work, the heart of the world of informants is the deal. And then you ask me, what does an informant deal look like? And the answer is anything you can imagine. So a young college student gets caught with a few pills and some marijuana. And her name was Rachel Hoffman. She lived in Florida. And she was caught by police. And they

told her, you're going to go to jail unless you become an informant. And she was scared of going to jail. So she agreed. They sent her on a sting, a very dangerous sting involving a lot of drugs and a gun. And when she went on the sting, the police lost track of her. The targets found the wire in her purse and they killed her. They killed Rachel Hoffman with the gun that the police had given her to set up the targets. Wow. Think in comparison. And so at one end of the spectrum, a snitching deal looks like a vulnerable person who's afraid of police, who's afraid of going to jail, who is coerced and pressured into risking their lives. At the other end of the spectrum of informant deals, there was a well-known, very corrupt political lobbyist named Jack Abramoff

some number of years ago, and he started a huge scandal on Capitol Hill because it came to light that he had been bribing officials, that he had been stealing money from native tribes. He pled guilty. He was facing 30 years, all told, with the corruption and the fraud charges. But he ended up doing four. Really? Because he snitched.

Wow. Because he cut a very – obviously a very favorable deal and testified against Capitol Hill aides, people in the White House. One congressperson was actually convicted based on his testimony. Wow. And so at the other end of the spectrum, there are people who – some thought that Jack Abramoff was destabilizing our democracy. Abramoff was destabilizing our democracy. And yet, because his testimony was considered so valuable, he was able to cut a deal in which he did less time in prison than he would have if he had sold two tablespoons of crack. Wow. But he was not like some poor guy caught up in a drug bust with some weed in his pocket.

He was like a bad guy doing bad things. He was a serious bad guy. Yeah. At the highest level, like he's the sort of person who if we want to fix things in America, we need to be stopping people like that who are literally like perverting the engine of democracy for their own gain kind of stuff. And for that to be four years? I mean that was national news. So the story wasn't actually over with Jack Abramoff. So Jack Abramoff gets out.

He says he's reformed. And Congress in response to that scandal passed a lobbying integrity act because of Jack Abramoff, creating new rules, new transparency rules, new reporting rules. Several years after Mr. Abramoff got out, he re-upped as a lobbyist and then violated the law that was created in his honor by failing to disclose. He violated Jack's law? He violated his own law, He violated his own law. Was indicted.

Wow. Never did a day in jail. Wow. Because he has agreed, fill in the blank. To snitch again. To cooperate. A second time. A second time.

Wow. And so one of the great, I think one of the really- So you can just, if you want to break laws, you can do it as long as you just say, oh, that other guy's breaking laws. Like, is that all it takes? So the message we have sent by running the criminal system this way, running plea bargaining this way, and running the informant market this way, is we have sent a message to sophisticated culprits like Jack Abramoff, like the folks on Wall Street, like the cartel members, that at the end of the day, everything is negotiable. And if you are sufficiently knowledgeable and willing to

cooperate, then you can work off literally any crime, including murder, bribery, crimes that we named legislation after in order to avoid, it can all be worked off. message to the whole world that crime and guilt and harm is negotiable if you have enough information and are useful enough to the government. I mean, this is also very much the opposite of how informing and snitches are depicted again in media. I don't mean to bring it back to media so much, but that is where we're talking about criminal justice, where we get our ideas the most. And, you know, the way it's always depicted, high-level, sophisticated people like you're describing, is, you know, like mob movies, The Sopranos,

like, don't you fucking snitch! No, we got a code! We don't, we never snitch, right? As being, like, the last thing that anybody would do. What you're describing is, hey, if, it sounds like a modern-day Tony Soprano or whoever else would say, yeah, let's all just snitch. If we all just bargain,

then nothing that bad will happen to anybody. That becomes a strategy that is worthwhile to pursue rather than a cult of silence, a cult of like, hey, just bargain with the feds. It won't be that bad. So many of my colleagues who work in corporate law complain that the message has been sent not only to individual wrongdoers, but the corporations themselves right because a corporation can cooperate just as much as an individual can and they're uh the do not prosecute agreements that the department of justice enters into with dozens and dozens of high level corporations so that the corporation can avoid prosecution by cooperating are legendary. And so the fact that we run our criminal system as a market in all these ways has all these costs that almost never make it to late because, of course, they are negotiated. These are not trials.

We never learn the evidence. The things that the public learns are what the parties agree to disclose. So it's just like, well, all those corporations know that even if they do get prosecuted for doing something wrong, hey, they can just cut a deal and they can cut a deal with favorable terms. Yes. corporate law myself, but like I said, my colleagues have voiced concerns that this message has really undermined the ability of the government and law enforcement to get corporate compliance up front because everyone knows that they can cut a deal. Well, let's return to the story of Rachel Hoffman, you said at the beginning. That's the opposite, as you said, spectrum. This is someone who is very, very disempowered rather than a sophisticated operator who's cutting a deal to reduce their jail time or make sure they don't have any at all. This is someone who was frightened and presumably didn't

have those resources of negotiation. So how does, tell me more about how snitching structurally affects folks in that situation. Yeah, it's such an important feature of the informant market, just how exploitative and violent and destructive it is to the most vulnerable. So obviously Rachel Hoffman was a young person without – she didn't know how to handle the problem. She didn't know how to handle the problem. She didn't know how to handle the police. She was frightened. She ended up doing something extraordinarily dangerous

without full information. We see this all the time. The book opens with a description of her terrible case or terrible tragedy, also the story of a young woman named Shelley Hilliard, whose story was also featured some years ago in a New Yorker article. Shelly Hilliard was, she was caught smoking weed with a friend, 18 years old in Detroit, I think. And police, again, threatened her, said she was going to go to jail if she didn't turn in her

dealer. Shelly Hilliard was a transgender woman. Going to jail for a person like that is a life-threatening proposition. So, of course, she agreed. And what year was this? What decade? It was last decade. Okay. Right in the heart of the war on drugs.

Yeah. And so she identified her dealer. He was arrested. He was released. And he went after Shelley Hilliard, and he killed her. And it's a terrible story. It's a terrible tragedy that Shelley's mother, her words always resonate with me.

Her mother said they just threw her away. And that's what we do at that end of the spectrum and that part of the informant market. We throw people away. It's dehumanizing. It's violent. There are no limits on the vulnerability of informants. We use children. We let law enforcement use children. We let law enforcement coerce people who have substance use disorders, mental health issues.

We provide almost no protection for the most vulnerable. And so when you ask me for examples, and I said, let me count the ways, it is because we don't regulate. We just say to law enforcement, anyone you pick, no matter how vulnerable, no matter how culpable, we're going to leave it to you. And that's why the culture of secrecy around informant use is so destructive, because we have just turned it over to the discretion of individual law enforcement officials, individual departments, and they make these choices in the ways we've just been talking about. Well, in both the cases you're talking about, make me think about how much incredible power

and leverage the police or the prosecutors have in that situation to say, hey, you're going to go to prison, you're at trial, if you lose, you'll go away away for this long etc um and they're able to use that to get something that they want they want to go after the drug dealer sure i assume that you know the the a young woman smoking weed with her friend is not actually a high value target for uh the cops um so it sounds like to me it creates uh it creates an incentive for them to go after those people and say, hey, guess what? If we can like put someone into the system for smoking weed with their friend, well, then we'll have something over them that we can turn that person into a pawn because we have that amount of leverage. Whereas if they didn't have the leverage, they wouldn't be bothering teenagers smoking weed with their friends quite as much, I would imagine. Like it creates an incentive for them to, you know, go after and harm those people. Yeah, that's a great point. There are a whole bunch of things

that you just packed into that thought. Let me just unpack a couple of them. I would love you to. So the incentive to go after people and to put pressure on people that they wouldn't otherwise go after to turn them essentially into tools. So that is one of the great costs of permitting this kind of transaction because we're essentially incentivizing law enforcement to treat people as a means to an end. Yeah. And that's why we get, I think, so much dehumanizing, violent, terrible treatment of informants

because we have sent the message it's okay to use people as pawns. You also pointed out, though, that it is an extraordinary amount of state power. And usually when we confer that much power on the government, we ask for a report. We ask for – it's a report. We ask for some accountability, some oversight.

If you think about the billions of dollars that we spend on intrusive, important social programs, we say if you're going to do all this work affecting people's lives, we want to know, oh, government, what you're doing and how you're doing it. And we have exempted this world of informants from that accountability, from basically that democratic accountability. Why? Because law enforcement has been telling us for decades, oh, we can't tell you that. You can't breach the confidentiality or we won't be able to do this work. And I want to say until relatively recently, last decade or so, we have essentially accepted that rationale. But of course it isn't true. It isn't true that the government needs utmost secrecy in cutting deals with teenagers in order to wage the war on drugs.

It is not the case. This is not CIA working in Russia you know, working in Russia, trying to protect their sources kind of stuff. This is, yeah, like you said, this is roughing up 18-year-olds. And we certainly don't need the kind of internal lack of accountability and kind of secrecy that we permit in this public policy space to an extent that we would never tolerate in any other sort of major public policy.

There's also a kind of scrutiny that's given to certain types of leniency in the criminal justice system. If you look at what's happening with any attempt at bail reform in America where, you know, there's some very basic protections put in place that like, you know, every, as I often say, like every editorial page calls for, we have to, you know, decrease mass incarceration. It's a horrible problem. It's expensive. It's wasteful. It's destroying human lives, you know, and all the things that go with it. As soon as some little reform is done, the press or politicians start going, well, look at this person. Look at, here's a horrible criminal who got, you know got less time in prison than they would have otherwise, or they got out on the street early, etc., really drawing attention to those cases.

No one does that for informants. No one says, this person cut a deal, that Jack Abramoff story. I'd never heard that. Again, that guy was front page news for like a year, and I'd never heard that, that he got off with four years instead of 30, or any other case along those lines. No one is saying, hold on a second, let's really look into what you're doing here, in the same way they do for any other number of cases.

So there's two reasons for that. One is that the use of informants itself is so clandestine, we only find out if something terrible happens. Ah, okay. We only find out when Rachel Hoffman is killed. So there are not records of this that you can, there's no informant database where you can go see, let me add up how much time has been removed from people's sentences or whatever as a result of this.

So there's no database because we do not require the government to keep track of the deals that it cuts, the crimes it solves. Solves. Well, the putative reasoning behind permitting informants to be used is that it's going to increase our overall public safety, that we're going to catch worse criminals by leaning on the little fish, as it were, the little fish, big fish model. And occasionally we see stories like that. So the FBI, you know, years and years of going after organized crime and there are five, you know, we talked about media, five movies about mafia informants. That's probably the classic example of we used the little fish,

the hitmen, the mafia functionaries to go after John Gotti, to go after the leadership. But most of the time, that's not how we use informants. We don't flip little fish to get big fish. Sometimes we cut deals with big fish to give us lots of little fish because it means we have a higher conviction rate. It means we got a lot of people. It means we're looking productive, even though at the end of the day, it may be that the most culpable person got away with the worst crimes and we leaned on the lower level people and made examples out of the people who actually were less culpable.

In other words, a lot of the time snitching gets it exactly backwards. Yeah. Like it sounds like the Jack Abramoff case is one of those where like that's the guy. I mean, if you can prosecute a congressperson, I get it. But still, he was the guy and he was allowed to go do it again and again inform. So here's the thing. You could imagine a Democratic conversation where we would all sit around the table and say, is this really worth it? Is this a good idea? Look, I mean, we got a congressman out of Jack Abramoff. We could live with four years. We don't think he's a good guy. But there is a means and

analysis that you could imagine if we actually had the information about informant deals, we as a community could sit around and say, yes, that was worth it. No, that was terrible. Yes, that made Wall Street a little more transparent because you cut a deal with a hedge fund broker. No, this was too destructive. But we don't know. We don't make law enforcement even give us the information that would permit us to have that conversation as a polity, as a community community and so in this space sometimes the transparency reforms are the most powerful because then we would know and just as importantly law enforcement would know that we were gonna know which might change some of the most terrible exploitative practices if law

enforcement understood that eventually somebody is going to know the choice that you made. Yeah. Well, we haven't even gotten into wrongful convictions yet, which I want to get to right after we take a quick break. We'll be right back with more Alexandra Nantipoff. Okay, so we're back with Alexandra Netapoff. So, look, it strikes me that if the government, if law enforcement is out there offering to knock years off of people's sentences for fingering other people, people who the police want to finger with the crime. That also creates an incentive for people who are locked up to,

or facing a crime themselves to just like randomly point the finger at whoever the cops want. And it strikes me as a tool that could like really systemically lead to wrongful convictions on a massive scale. Is that the case? So one of the reasons that we even know as much about informants as we do and are now paying closer attention to them is because the innocence movement over the past 20 years has made so clear that using informants runs an enormous risk of wrongful conviction. for fabrication are obvious, particularly but not limited to the jail environment where everyone's together. Everyone is in an institution where by hypothesis, everyone has been accused of a crime. So it's easy to accuse people of things that they didn't do because they're already disadvantaged vis-a-vis their own credibility. And so about a decade ago, Northwestern University Law School released a groundbreaking report on the use of informants, and they looked at all the wrongful capital convictions that

we know of. Death penalty cases. Death penalty cases. Everybody who was on death row who should not have been there. case, everybody who was on death row who should not have been there. And they found that over 45% of those cases were due to a lying informant. Wow. Half of them. Almost half of them. And the single largest source of wrongful capital convictions, meaning the most serious cases that we take the most seriously, the most terrible penalty, were wrongful getting

innocent people because of informants. And so that really put us on notice of just how pervasive and destructive this snitch-based wrongful conviction problem could be. And then since then, the Innocence Project in New York and the Innocence Movement all over the country have been delving deeper into these cases. And it's one of the reasons we're seeing some change. We are seeing legislatures say this is an unacceptable way to run a criminal system. We're going to have – we're going to make the government keep better track of their jailhouse informants.

So no more of this, well, I didn't know they were used in five cases before mine. Five cases? At least. We have seen case after case where prosecutors said, oh, we didn't have the records to know that this person had been cooperating for years with other departments. So more tracking requirements, more transparency and disclosure requirements. There's a procedural mechanism called a reliability hearing. So if a Connecticut just passed a law requiring a reliability hearing in all murder and rape cases.

So it means that if the government, if the prosecutor says, I want to use a jailhouse snitch in my case, before they're allowed to do that, they have to go to the judge and there'll be a hearing with defense counsel and the judge will screen the informant and say, how long have you been doing this? How many other cases have you cut deals in? Are you so unreliable as a witness, in other words, that we're not going to let you infect this trial? We're not going to let you testify. And so that's a relatively new mechanism that states are starting to adopt the ideas. Let's rein this in. Let's have some checks on a phenomenon that is so obviously an invitation to fabrication and wrongful conviction that it seems odd to

believe that we've let it go so unregulated for so long. I mean, most of the other, again, you know, tools that prosecutors and police use to wrongfully convict people are things that intuitively you would think would work or we have been told would work, you know, like fingerprint analysis or eyewitness testimony. It takes a while to explain why eyewitness testimony is not as reliable as one would think as a means to, that it can be, you know, influenced by the police or, or the memory is fallible, all those sorts of things. But, you know, we've, we've established that pretty well, but informants are like, it's not obvious why it would work, right? Because you're asking someone, you've given someone something

in order to make the claim. And also it's often someone, right, who has been convicted of a crime themselves, which in a lot of people's eyes makes them less trustworthy. Not necessarily mine, but it's certainly a cultural presumption that if you're locked up yourself, we should take your word less carefully. So it's very odd that it's something that wouldn't receive a lot of scrutiny, like that you're describing that a judge would grill the informant and say, well, how do we know you're telling the truth that you would think that would be the default? That's a great point. So because the informant world is so diverse, it works in all kinds of ways. So the jailhouse snitch is maybe the paradigmatic invitation to fabrication.

But we see it in drug cases all the time where, you know, someone is caught, charged with a crime, drug or drug-related crimes, and often the drug task force will cut a deal with them. They'll say, if you bring us 10, 20, 30 arrests, if you work for us, you can work off your... It's not just like, hey, if you inform on this one guy, we'll knock off a couple years. It's like, if you work for us

for what sounds like a couple of years, if you basically come work for us for free almost, we will eventually knock years off. Is that what it is? Well, of course it's not for free almost, we will eventually knock yours off. Is that what it is? Well, of course it's not for free because they're working off their burglary charge, their own drug charges, their own...

But this sounds like a form of indentured servitude. Like, hey, you have to work off your debt? Like, that's pretty wild. So there are all kinds of things that are troubling about these deals. One of them, and we've seen this over and over again, is that person who has cut the deal now with the drug task force goes out and frames innocent people. They fabricate drugs.

They plant drugs. And because numbers are so important in this particular drug enforcement area, we've seen all these scandals where police just didn't check. They didn't check the white powder that came back that the informant said was cocaine, but turned out not to be cocaine. They didn't wire the informant so there was no recording or the recordings didn't work. There was one story where an informant was wearing a wire, was recorded. And so she hired people to be the voices of her alleged targets and fabricated deals with imaginary voices and fingered innocent people. No one ever checked the tapes. There's a lot of entrepreneurial spirit in the informant world. You should never underestimate the creativity of a person who is facing years in prison. I mean, that's all I would devote all my creative energy to if I was in prison or if I was facing years in prison would be to, hey, what's every

lever I can use to get out? And it stands to reason that people would eventually start doing that. Yeah. So there are spaces in which we now know that fabrication is particularly rampant and invited. They tend to be areas in which we don't have a lot of checking, a lot of accountability, not a lot of defense lawyers, right? These are people who are being checking, a lot of accountability, not a lot of defense lawyers. These are people who are being targeted and framed on the ground in public housing projects and small communities. And then there are the white collar spaces, the Jack Abramoffs, the David Slane hedge fund informants. They have lawyers. They're wearing wires. They're being checked because the people against whom their evidence is going to be used are going to have

lawyers. They are going to check. And so then you see a whole different kind of practice where I think the concern is not so much the wrongful conviction because everyone is walking around very carefully making sure that the T's are crossed and the I's are dotted. I'm glad you checked that your T's are crossed and I's are dotted on that. So it's not a universal phenomenon. It takes place where people are unmonitored, where people are vulnerable, where, as you pointed out, in jail, people are unmonitored, where people are vulnerable, where, as you pointed out, in jail, people are already distrusted and don't have resources. That's where we see the prevalence of wrongful conviction. And do you think that, I mean, look, I apologize for being cynical about the criminal justice

system. But when I go through all of these different means that the cops and prosecutors use to get convictions, right? Bad forensic science, coerced confessions, manipulated eyewitness testimony, and informants, as you're now discussing, to me, it looks like we have a system in which prosecutors and cops, their main job is to finger and convict somebody. And they sort of pick who that person is. And all the tools that we give them are means that they can use in order to convict that person. Right. Regardless, they're not detectives who are trying to figure out who did it. They decide that person did it. And now here are all the tools we can use to make that case.

However, we like that. That's what it looks like to me in my cynical moments. And so, and by the way, in a way that is enormously racially discriminatory, that can only be seen as like a means of racial suppression by another name in many cases. So when I hear, hey, you know, like transparency, right, with the informant system should solve that, I'm a little bit like, is that the problem? Is it the is it the transparency or is it that the, is it like the rest of the structure around this? I, yeah. Do you have any view on that? On, on, on, on all the interesting things you just said. I have many views. I don't think you ever have to apologize for cynicism when you're talking to a criminal law professor. Thank you. This is why I love this conversation.

So let's unpack a couple of the things you said. One is transparency. Transparency is not the end. Transparency is the tool to have a better, fairer criminal system. In some places, we have perfect transparency and it's still terrible. Yeah. But at least we know and we can write an article or two about it. Well, we can elect different people. Yeah. We can fight about it. We can push back against policies that are unfair or that are inaccurate or that are racist or that are too expensive.

The reason I think that transparency is powerful in the informant space is because so many of its unfairnesses and dysfunctions I think flow from the fact that nobody thinks they're ever going to be checked. No one's going to know that they pressured the vulnerable trans woman with the threat of jail into turning in her dealer. No one's ever going to find that out. And so the idea is not transparency for its own sake, but the idea that if people, if we knew what it was, we would be even more appalled than we currently are. If law enforcement knew that the decisions they made would eventually be checked, then they would behave differently up front. Then they wouldn't make the same deals. They would behave, frankly, more like they behave

in the more resourced, regulated spaces of white collar crime, political corruption, where everybody's watching and everyone thinks it matters. And this hooks up to your insight about the role of race and disadvantage, which is the fact that we tolerate these practices are in part because they are visited so often on the politically dispossessed, on people of color, on low-income communities that don't have a political voice. voice. If I might share a story from the book, the book starts with the story of Catherine Johnston, who was a 92-year-old grandmother in Atlanta. And Atlanta police picked up a drug dealer on the street, cut a deal with him. They said, we'll let you go if you give us a good tip. So he said, there are two kilos of cocaine at this address. The police went and got a warrant. They could not use that particular drug dealer's name as the name of their source because he wasn't a valid registered informant. So they invented another informant. They just made up a confidential, a reliable confidential informant has told us that they purchased drugs at this address.

Wow. They get a no-knock warrant. They burst into the house. Katherine Johnston's home. There are no drugs. There are no drug dealers. 92-year-old woman. 92-year-old woman.

Miss Johnston thinks that she is being robbed. Yeah. And so she goes for a weapon that she has in her house and the police kill her. Jesus Christ. With a warrant in which they have committed perjury by lying about their source. In order to cover up the fact that they lied about the warrant

and killed Mrs. Johnston, they called another informant of theirs named Alex White and said, we'll give you $130 if you say that you bought drugs at this address. In other words, to create, after the fact, the basis for the warrant about which they lied to get into the house. God. It gets weirder. Okay.

We would never know about this. I told you, we only know about this when something goes terribly wrong. We would never know why Mrs. Johnston was killed, except that it just happened to be that Alex White was not only working as an informant for the Atlanta Police Department, but also for the ATF. Okay. And he calls his ATF handler and says, ATF.

Okay. And he calls his ATF handler and says, my Atlanta handlers want me to lie and say X, Y, Z. His ATF handler says, don't do that. This is the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms. Yes, the Federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms. Alex White comes forward and the whole thing blows open. And that is why we know how it came to be that Atlanta police killed Katherine Johnston. But this never would have happened

in a wealthy white neighborhood. They never would have- You can bet your ass. They never would have cut that deal and gotten that warrant if they had the impression that the system would hold them accountable for it. And so that is why transparency matters, not for its own sake, but so that law enforcement can be held accountable in the spaces

where people like Mrs. Johnston can't defend themselves. Yeah. Okay. You've convinced me on transparency, but I mean, the layers of discrimination go so deep there. They wouldn't have cut the deal in the wealthy white neighborhood. They also wouldn't have been looking for drugs in the wealthy white neighborhood in the first place. They wouldn't have done the first step of it in the wealthy white neighborhood. And we're getting into, you know, an area of like overall, you know, the discriminatory nature of criminal justice in this country that goes far beyond, I think, the subject of your book, but like, it it's impossible not to notice it at every level. Well, so one of the chapters in the book is devoted to the community cost of using informants in the war on drugs in low-income communities of color in the way that we do.

And it's exactly right. What you're pointing out is that the cost of this policy, this sloppy, violent, dehumanizing policy is born disproportionately by black communities. And so in the chapter, I describe how it is because we over police black communities for drugs. It means that we are overusing informants in those communities. That's why the Atlanta police could cut that deal in that neighborhood to get a no-knock warrant for that particular house. And we see all over the country that residents of black communities and low-income communities of color are experiencing the heightened crime because informants are out there looking for ways to work off their own charges but continuing to commit their offenses. The violence that goes with informants, with stop snitching, with retribution against witnesses, the fear that people have of testifying. And then – and this was something I learned when I was a federal public defender

and working in Baltimore, the message, and this message really, we've been talking about this whole time, this terrible message that we're sending to the most over-policed communities in America, the communities that are most harmed by mass incarceration. We're saying, oh, but if you're useful, we'll cut a deal. In other words, the whole thing is morally contingent. That we're not locking you up because we believe in the morality of fighting crime. Because if you were willing to cut a deal with us, then everything is on the table. Everything is negotiable, even the most serious crimes. And so what a terrible, anti-democratic, disrespectful message to send to the communities

that are paying the price of mass incarceration. When I was living and working in Baltimore, I learned from my neighbors, from my friends, from the, I taught after school classes in some of the Baltimore community centers, from the kids who entirely understood that it was an amoral, unprincipled enterprise because they knew the drug dealers were on the street corner making deals with police officers, but they were getting locked up on the weekend for loitering and having their lives ruined for garbage. And it was just, I think it's one of the most profound costs of our snitching market is just that it sends this message of moral relativism to – and it's insulting. It's insulting to the people who suffer from it.

That the people in the community know, well, some people get to do this because they cooperate with the cops and the cops therefore license the behavior that they're simultaneously prosecuting. And so therefore it's all bullshit. Like why would – why not do it? Why obey the laws at all or why have any respect for it or why have any – why give it any credibility? Why believe in it if the people prosecuting it don't believe it's bad enough to stop in fact they license it and and reward people for for doing it exactly i shared the story in the book about a conversation i had with a 12 year old yeah in in one of these classes and he said look i got a question police let dealers stay on the corner because they're snitching. Is that legal? I mean, can the police do that?

And I said – and I explained to him what you and I have been discussing, that this is how the American system confers discretion on police to let people who are committing crimes off if they're useful. And this kid, this young kid and his friends, they were disgusted. They're like, so all you got to do is snitch and you can keep on dealing. And the police aren't doing their job. They knew. They knew they were living in this marketplace. And it's one of the reasons I wrote the book in 2009, because if the 12-year-olds in Baltimore know it, but we're not talking about it in the criminal justice discourse, then something is terribly, terribly wrong. But I think that community cost is really one of the great unacknowledged costs of the informant market. But then if we go from that end of the spectrum and talk about a community that's over-policed, prosecuting the war on drugs, which is a war that I don't think we need to be prosecuting.

Drugs have their problems and the regulation needs to happen, but not in the form that we're doing now. I could give a shit about what the people do on the corners. That's not my concern in America generally. My concern is with what the Jack Abramoffs of the world are doing and the people at the very high end. And so messaging to those people, to those corporations, to those like, you know, white shoe firms of all different descriptions that break the law regularly to message to them. Oh, also for you, you know, the consequences are

all negotiable is worse, frankly, because we're allowing wrongdoers at the highest levels to get off the hook on a massive scale. Yes, just to play devil's advocate for one moment. Oh, okay. All right. Please. So I've been criticizing the use of informants for years. Can we take a quick break? We can take a—

Because this is going to be the best tease. People are going to listen to the whole ad because they're like, we've got to hear what Alexandra does for this devil's advocate. And that's going to be an awesome way to get us across the ad break. So we're going to take a quick break.

We'll be right back with more Alexandra Natapoff, and you have to hear what she's going to say next. Okay, you made it through the ad break. We're back with Alexandra Natapoff. Please tell me your devil's advocate argument. Okay. Devil's advocate. Enron. Okay.

Political corruption. political corruption, the highly insulated, wealthy, well-resourced wrongdoers who without the ability to infiltrate corrupt organizations, we might never be able to hold them accountable. So I want to just resurrect the big fish theory for one moment. resurrect the big fish theory for one moment, it is true that the way we practice informed menus, the way we actually run the market is unprincipled and sloppy and destructive. But I just want to preserve, for argument's sake, the understanding that we never could have prosecuted the CEO of Enron if it hadn't been for cooperators. We never could go after political conspiracies or economic conspiracies because unlike the vulnerable people that we sweep into the criminal net, unlike the Rachel Hoffmans of this world and the Shelley Hilliards, there are, as we began by discussing, there are very powerful culprits, people who are exploiting and themselves exploiting the vulnerable against whom the use of informants could be a very powerful tool. And so the reason I want to be devil's advocate about it is to come back to the conversation we were having before about what kind of conversation would we have as a community if we actually knew the costs? Might we say, you know what?

Might we say, you know what? You can – so for example, in the collapse of the Enron Corporation, one of the greatest corporate corruption scandals in American history. And the government wanted to go after Kenneth Lay who's the CEO and they prosecuted Andrew Fastow who's the CFO of the corporation, and they wanted him to testify against his longtime friend and compatriot, Kenneth Lay, and he wouldn't do it. So they prosecuted his wife for tax fraud, and they had two young children. And the government said, if you don't testify against Kenneth Lay, we're going to go after you and your wife at the same time, and your children will be orphans. So on the one hand, there's something obvious. It reveals that power, that unfettered, distasteful power that the government has at its disposal. And I'm worried that I enjoy hearing that story about the CFO and his wife, and I didn't like it about,

I don't like, you know, the power is a problem regardless of who it's wielded against. Yes. So that's the tricky thing about American criminal law, right? Because it does such a terrible job, right? It does such a terrible job.

It doesn't, it keeps so few people safe. We know that in the very same communities that we over-police, people are under-protected, that homicide clearance rates are low, that people don't feel safe, that they don't think 911 is going to answer their call. So it's the flip side, really, of that disrespect. We over-police in ways that we shouldn't, and then we under-police in ways that we shouldn't and then we under-police for the things that we should. And yet at the same time, our criminal system is also supposed to be going after true culprits who make our democracy less safe, who steal literally billions of dollars from the public and private. And so our problem I think is not that we have – that we might want to go after very culpable people. It's that our tools – tools is a word that you used earlier and I want to come back to that.

We have terrible tools. That the way we use informants is a terrible tool. We don't keep track of it. It's not regulated. We just – we hand it out like Halloween candy. Anyone can do it. That's not how we should be running such a risky, violent, important public policy. If we did, might we be able to hold Wall Street more accountable? If we did, might we be able to? Is there a way to use this tool without sacrificing the vulnerable, without the racial disproportion? We have never run that experiment in the United States.

But to preserve the possibility that law enforcement could go after the truly powerful, I'd just like to keep that on the table. So would I. But I think my question is whether the cause and effect are backwards. Like it's, oh, we misuse informants, so therefore we don't go after Wall Street. I would say, isn't the problem that culturally we don't want to go after Wall Street? The system that we have built is built to not go after Wall Street, but instead to go after the disadvantaged people who you mentioned, to go after communities of color and over-police them. That is what we have designed and built. And if we actually had a cultural commitment or a structural commitment or a democratic decision to go after Wall Street, well, we'd fucking do it. But we don't. So we would build the tools that we needed if we did, in fact,

want to. I'm very glad to be reminded that the CEO of Enron was prosecuted. But I think the American people are generally quite angry about how, you know, you hear it after 2008, well, where were the prosecutions, et cetera? We don't need to litigate that particular crisis, but there's a widespread belief that, you know, white collar criminals do not go to prison. The, the, the, uh, uh, example that you raise of Jack Abramoff is a, is a really excellent one. Uh, that's indicative of that. So, I mean, is the problem not our, our priorities? And I mean, that makes it a hard problem to solve. You might have some policy prescriptions for how to reform the informant

system that are clear and I don't know what my policy prescriptions are other than I don't know, have some more elections and elect some different people. But yeah, to me at the root that seems to be the problem. So the problems with informants are a symptom

not a cause. The reason we use them less and more carefully and more lawfully in these protected, well-resourced spaces is, as you say, not because of informant policy. That's because of a lack of political will to go after the powerful. Yeah. So you and I are in agreement there. Here's the proposition. Here's the proposition. Here's the thought. If we're in agreement that our criminal system does not work the way it should, it goes after the wrong people for the wrong things.

What thread do you pull to change that? Not to change a rule, not to change a tool or a handbook, but to change our priorities and our commitments. And I think that pressing on the informant question is one thread that we can fruitfully pull because it has everything. It has the exploitation of the vulnerable. It is it goes it disproportionately harms and burdens people of color and communities of color. It lets wealthy white people off the hook. It shows us the holes in our legal fabric, what its potentials and also what its failures are. So I and it's central to the way we run 95% of our criminal system, which is the plea system. So it's so central to all the things that we would want to change. And then if we did change

them, so it would be no small thing to change the culture of secrecy around informant use. It would be no small thing to say, you can't use someone with a substance abuse problem as an informant. You can't go after children. That would be – they seem so self-evident. We use children. Yes, we do. There are only three states that prohibit by law the use of minors as informants. The reason we don't do it is because of our priorities.

If we change the way we ran the informant market, we would be changing some fundamental priorities about fairness, about egalitarianism, about racism, about vulnerability, about the war on drugs and substance use disorders suffered by so many people who get swept into that system. So I like snitching as a doorway, not only for its own sake, but because it lets us go after some of the worst dysfunctions of American criminal justice. OK, that's that's a compelling argument. But do you have any concern that, say, your policy prescriptions, right, you have the power to get them adopted? You know, a new governor takes office in Massachusetts, right, and says, let's reform everything.

Some new DAs as well. And, you know, you're hired as the main consultant, right, and you're able to make your big list of things. Oh, my God, this list is great. Let's do it tomorrow. Are you at all worried that the same thing might happen as has happened with bail reform or sentencing reform or any of these other movements where smart people such as yourselves and smart politicians take a look and say, well, we need to institute this. It's going to save money. It's going to reduce the cost of human life, et cetera, et cetera. And it's going to make a dent in our racialized discriminatory criminal justice system. And then you make those changes, and then a bunch of people come out of the woodwork in the media,

politically, on the streets, and say, hold on a second. You're letting criminals free. You're upending the racial and wealth-based hierarchy that we liked. they're not saying that directly, but they're saying that sort of quietly, you know, and get that like that. To me, when I look at these issues, these disparate issues in criminal justice, they all lead back to the same place of America's racial hierarchy and of, you know, the wealthy and powerful being able to make sure that laws don't apply to them. And those are fundamental problems of humanity. And I worry that sometimes, and, you know, as good as all the policy proposals are, that once you make them, once you actually make the changes, you run up against the original cause, which is the hierarchy that's present in our society that our criminal justice system is just expressing. So the frustration that you are expressing is the frustration with how do you

change things? Yeah. Big things. Yeah. Yeah. It's one of my favorite subjects. I love it. Criminal law is just a way. Yeah. But it's so representative of so many of those hierarchies and so many of those injustices. When I first started out as a young attorney, I thought I was going to be a civil rights attorney. And I moved to Baltimore to be a civil rights attorney. And then the 12-year-olds told me that the thing that was corroding their sense of safety and well-being and existence was the criminal system. I thought, oh, I got the label wrong. And that was when I became a public defender because it's a different way of going after inequality. It's a different way

of going after dehumanization. Can any one set of policy changes fix inequality? Of course not. Yeah. Policy changes fix inequality? Of course not. But there are some policy changes that can make a big difference in a lot of people's lives. And in the criminal system, we see that every day. Bail reform is a perfect example that even as we fight over bail reform and we're disappointed that the uptake hasn't been better and the pushback. It's been reversed in many places.

And reversed in many places. And reversed in many places. But all along the way, the people who were released who would not have been released, those victories, every human being who experienced liberty a little longer, every young person who gets caught with a small amount of drugs and isn't pressured into becoming an informant and risking their lives. I like hanging out at the largest levels of policy and reform and change as much as the next person, maybe even as much as you do. But I also think in the criminal system, every change we make helps a life, helps a human, preserves liberty, helps that family. And so it's, of course, the changes that I recommend at the end of the book are partial.

All policy reforms are partial. But they are also part of a conversation that we have in this country that we are are having in this. I've been doing criminal justice for a long time. And the conversation after the murder of George Floyd, the conversation that was advanced by the pandemic, by all the disruption and all the change and all the things that we have learned as a community, we're in a time where policy changes are a way we get to talk about our priorities, about how we want our criminal system to be less racist, how we want it to be less violent. So informants are the vehicle for having that conversation today. We could have it via the conversation about the use of police force against unarmed civilians. We could have the conversation through our analysis of the war on drugs or mass incarceration. Each of those vehicles is a way for us to change

our priorities. And I think that talking about informants is helpful because it is about mass incarceration. It's about the dehumanization and devaluation of human liberty and life and well-being that is at the heart of mass incarceration. You change it here, it changes there. Yeah, that's a fantastic answer. And I know that what I was asking for, my question, is kind of an unreasonable thing to ask for. I'm saying, well, isn't the problem racism? Isn't the problem the fact that people who have more power have more power and are able to, you know, exempt themselves from the rules that bind others? And I don't know what the solution is to those extremely deep problems of the human condition. I can't say, you know, I can I can ask for us to label them clearly.

But, you know, I can't I can't ask, hey, can we snap our fingers and solve that problem? but I can't ask, hey, can we snap our fingers and solve that problem? And yeah, the criminal justice system is huge and sprawling and infects every part of society and we have to change it everywhere that we can and I understand that. But a big thing that looms over this conversation and every conversation I've had about criminal justice

on this show is the wake of George Floyd's murder, we had that moment, it lasted about nine months and then the backlash has been going on for the two years since on this show is the wake of George Floyd's murder. We had that moment. It lasted about nine months. And then the backlash has been going on for the two years since. And more changes have happened because of the backlash than happened because of the George Floyd moment, in my view. Actually, that's how it's felt. I have not gone through and counted all the reforms that took place. And there's plenty of people say, hey, look, plenty of progressive prosecutors have won their elections and et cetera, and have changed policies, et cetera, et cetera. Let's move to a conversation about that, though.

This book came out initially, and you said 2009, and there has been a lot of change in the way informants have been used, correct? And what have we seen and what do you think we'll see in the future? So it's a lot relative to zero change that was occurring in 2009. So just to be clear, we are still running this enormous off-the-books black market deal scenario. The law has not changed that much. So we are still flipping children and we are still letting very serious people work off very serious crimes. And the basic legal infrastructure has not changed that much. But we have seen – so when I first wrote the book, just a handful of states had even considered reform.

Now, over half of all the states have either passed or considered substantial informant reform, jailhouse snitch reform, protecting children, requiring more transparency, more disclosure. So it's part of the conversation in a way that just wasn't true. That wasn't true a decade ago. I want to go back to your cynicism, though, for a moment, if I might. Oh, I would love you to. Because, you know, so the criminal system, it's just one of those ships that turns very slowly. And yes, it was so profoundly disappointing after the murder of George Floyd. And it seemed like we were in a moment when the country was having a new conversation about racism, about violence in the criminal system, about policing. A thousand book clubs bloomed.

And they all read those three books that everybody read. And then there was backlash just exactly as you described. And a lot of that was rolled back, but not all of it. And you gestured towards the election of progressive prosecutors, or progressive-minded prosecutors, depending on your points of view. And that is certainly one of the things that happened over midterms. But we have also seen cities quietly make changes in policing, using unarmed civilian patrols to do traffic enforcement. So there just aren't guns to create mental health team, responder teams. So there aren't guns when the state, not the police, but the state, the government to whom we pay taxes to help us out, responds to a mental health crisis. And so far be it for me to tell you not to be cynical.

I would never say that to a thoughtful person. But I do want to suggest that it never could have happened 10 years ago, that those changes were culturally and politically impossible a decade ago. And the fact that cities are just Salem, Oregon and Amherst, Mass are like, that's better. Let's do that instead. It's such an enormous cultural change. I was just, the Massachusetts District Court bench, which is, you know, hundreds of judges just had one of their annual conferences. And I was speaking there about the low-level criminal system. And there was a conversation among the bench about racism and inequality, just an open acknowledgement that this is something that we need to deal with in our own system. These are the judges, mind you, in a way that we just really didn't see a decade ago.

So that ship doesn't turn quickly. It doesn't turn perfectly. It leaves things behind. But I, and maybe this is too optimistic and you can discard it as unwarranted optimism, but it's been a long time since I saw this many people just naturally talking about racism in the criminal system. That was sort of a foreboding conversation. There weren't many activists and writers and scholars.

We might not be having this conversation if not for that moment happening. Yes. And so that's change. And so that's change. One of my – well, I'll leave it at that. That's change. Oh, you're not intrigued. I just – I think that with the upheavals that we've been through politically in the criminal system economically because of the pandemic um and and and and culturally and understanding our criminal system after of

course the murder of george floyd but the killing of michael brown the killing of philando castile the death of sandra bland all these conversations are destabilizing the culture of mass incarceration. It's not just the institutions. It's not just the handbook. It's not just the policy, although I consider myself to be a policy wonk, and I will argue with you about the handbook till the cows come home. But at the end of the day, as you point out, if we don't have the political will, the handbook won't matter. It's one of the things we see in the informant world.

You can have handbooks up the wazoo if nobody is reading them and paying attention to them and following them and no one is checking and no one is keeping track and there's no accountability. It doesn't matter what the lawyers put in the handbook. And I don't want to give up the idea that we are ready for a different and better conversation about the Rachel Hoffmans of this world and the Shelley Hilliards and all those innocent people who were swept up into the drug task force arrests because they cut a deal with some unaccountable informant. I think we're at that place. I think we can have that conversation. Like I said, it's one of the reasons I thought, I don't think it would be a waste of time to update this book, to put out the new data,

to put out the new proposals, to take another crack at using this as a platform to make our criminal system a better place. Wow. Well, I can't thank you enough for coming on to have a conversation with us about it today. This has been absolutely wonderful. The book, look, I'll do it like I'm a late-night host.

The book is called Snitching. You can get a copy at factuallypod.com slash books. Alexandra, thank you so much for being here. Thank you so much for having me. It's so wonderful for me. Really, really great to be here. Well, my God, thank you once again to Alexandra Natapoff for coming on the show. If you want to check out her book, Snitching, you can get a copy at factuallypod.com slash books. That's factuallypod.com slash books. And when you do, you'll

be supporting not just this show, but your local bookshop. I want to thank our producer, Sam Roudman, our engineer, Kyle McGraw, and everybody who supports this show on Patreon, especially those of you who support at the $15 a month level. I'm talking about Brighton. I'm talking about Kevin France. I'm talking about J. Scott Christensen. I'm talking about Weeb Milk. Thank you so much for your donation, Weeb Milk. And Mark Harris. And who could forget Peter Zeglin or Oren Cohen.

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