Try to wrap your head around this.. it is a known fact that 85% of the people who suffer from civil forfeitures are never charged.. never found guilty.. and many/most get pennies on the dollar back.. if anything at all.. Our justice dept using that money to pay confident informants – usually crooks or “bad guys” themselves to help law enforcement to find other assets to seize under asset forfeiture program.. Maybe they should rename it as the stool pigeon payment program ?
Federal agencies’ payments to confidential informants increase
The bulk of the disclosed awards went to whistleblowers. Their more shadowy cousins, confidential informants, got tens of millions, including $28.8 million in payments from a single Department of Justice fund, according to a report sent to Congress on Jan. 29. The informant payments came out of the Asset Forfeiture Program, which last year received $4.47 billion through the seizure of proceeds or tools of crimes.
The award payments “provide a tremendous incentive to individuals to assist [the Drug Enforcement Administration] in investigations of drug traffickers that result in the seizure and forfeiture of drug-related assets,” according to an Obama administration budget statement. The program also helped the FBI to fight “criminal schemes in white collar crime, organized crime, and narcotics trafficking,” the administration contends. Informants whose work led directly to seizures got $16.8 million from the program, while $12 million went to sources whose work didn’t lead directly to criminal assets. The total of $28.8 million continued a steady upward trend from $22.4 million five years earlier.
Defense attorneys sometimes argue that tying informant pay to seizures perverts the process.
“Now [informants are] being paid on a percentage basis, and the work is now more profit-driven than it is driven for the sake of uncovering criminal conduct,” said Downtown-based defense attorney Mark Sindler, who has defended several clients accused by federal informants. “That’s morally problematic.”
Filed under: General Problems
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