A Look at Jailhouse Informants

Los Angeles County prosecutors knew that jailhouse informant Leslie Vernon White was a liar even before he demonstrated that, from inside a jail, he could gather enough information about a murder case to implicate an inmate whom he had never met. Since the late 1970s, members of the district attorney’s office have regarded him as an unreliable and undesirable informant. Yet even after White perjured himself at the 1981 trial of Freeway Killer William Bonin, even after he falsely claimed in 1982 that Hillside Strangler Angelo Buono had confessed to him, prosecutors continued to use White as an informant. As Times staff writer Ted Rohrlich has reported, prosecutors recently have called White as a witness in three murder cases and used his statements about three other homicides.

How can prosecutors justify calling a witness whose credibility has repeatedly been shredded? Were innocent defendants sent to prison on the basis of White’s perjured testimony? Within that circle of jailhouse informants who trade information to prosecutors in return for leniency in their own cases, how many others are as adept at lying as White? These questions and others about the district attorney’s use of jailhouse informants deserve immediate answers.

But we are not optimistic that the public will learn the truth about Leslie White and his ilk as long as the district attorney’s office itself remains in charge of the investigation. As a general rule, no public institution should be trusted to investigate itself, and that principle seems especially applicable in this case; the revelations so far have cast just as much doubt on the prosecutors’ credibility as on White’s.

The excuse offered by the deputy district attorneys who knew White best is that, whenever he contacted them with a tale to tell about a pending case, they warned the prosecutor in charge about White’s history of lying but left it up to the prosecutor to decide whether to believe him. That practice, which was said to have been encouraged by high-level officials in the office, strikes us as blatantly cynical. A prosecutor who knowingly produces an unreliable witness, particularly one capable of concocting a phony confession, treats a criminal trial like a game in which the truth matters hardly at all. Defense attorneys may be just as likely to suborn perjury, but there’s something especially shocking about such conduct when it comes from a prosecutor, the people’s representative, with the immense powers of the state behind him.

Prosecutors who used White as a witness also claim that they corroborated his testimony beforehand, but such corroboration may mean very little. As White proved to sheriff’s deputies last month, it’s a simple matter for a jailhouse informant with access to a telephone to find out enough about the prosecution’s case to concoct a believable story. If an informant’s story corroborates the prosecution’s case, it may be because it is based on the prosecution’s case.

To promote a full and unbiased investigation, Los Angeles County Public Defender Wilbur Littlefield has already suggested that the district attorney’s office turn this matter over to California Atty. Gen. John K. Van de Kamp. We agree with Littlefield that someone else should be put in charge, but we would remove all prosecutors, including Van de Kamp, from the investigation, except as witnesses. To be credible, this probe should be carried out by a neutral agency empowered to hear from prosecutors, defense attorneys, law-enforcement officers and the jailhouse informants themselves. A federal grand jury might be the proper body, assuming that there are possible violations of federal civil rights involved. Or, at the very least, the Board of Supervisors should appoint an independent commission to investigate these matters, assess blame and make recommendations about how to restore the district attorney’s shattered credibility.