NOTE: PBS "Frontline" will air "Snitch," the show reviewed below, on
Tues., January 12, 1999.

'FRONTLINE' TO COVER 'SNITCHES' JAN 12

Rat Pack

In this age of scaredy-cat media, let's hear it for WGBH's Frontline
series, which continues to sponsor top-quality investigative
reporting. The latest in the long line is "Snitch," a documentary that
airs on PBS January 12. In this amazing show, veteran producer Ofra
Bikel examines the role of snitches in the drug war and captures the
injustice at the heart of the U.S. criminal justice system. Everyone
in Congress who swears by their constitutional duties should be forced
to watch "Snitch" and then do something about this spectacle of cruel
and unusual punishment.

The aberration began in the late 1980s, when Congress gave federal
prosecutors the power to assign harsh sentences for any drug offense,
and to offer cooperation deals as the only way out. Then Congress
passed a law allowing prosecutors to hit the lowest person in a drug
ring with a sentence fit for a kingpin-with no more evidence required
than the word of a single informant. Within a few years, drug
defendants were testifying against each other right and left.

There's one hitch: with so much incentive, snitches are terribly prone
to lie. But drug prosecutors don't have to prove the reliability of
their informants, and they don't have to fit the punishment to the
crime. If they did, many of the heartbreaking stories Bikel discovered
might never have come to be.

For example, Clarence Aaron, a college athlete with no prior record,
might not have ended up serving three life sentences for his minor
role in a single crack deal. Lulu Smith, whose son was a suspected
dealer, might not have been convicted by a prosecutor who knew she was
innocent.

Bikel was new to the subject. "I never used drugs. I don't know
anybody who takes drugs," she says. "I assumed that those people are
in jail because they got caught with drugs." In fact, under the
current laws, people can land in jail who had no drugs on them at all.
Along the way, Bikel met prosecutors who told her snitches are
indispensable in the drug war and defense attorneys who told her the
system invites "unbelievable abuse."

"It is really shameful," Bikel says. She has concluded that
prosecutors go on sending these minor players to jail because they're
too lazy to buck the system. "Informants are easy and making deals is
easy," she says. "But it is outrageous." Anyone who watches this show
with an open mind will have to agree.