Can a drug case built on a confidential informant be beaten?

The Case Rests on a Compromised Witness

Sale and trafficking cases often stand or fall on an informant, and informants have every reason to shade the truth.

Undercover drug operations rarely rely on the police alone. They rely on confidential informants (CIs), people who arrange and make “controlled buys” from a target. The problem is that CIs are almost never neutral. Most are:

• Working off their own charges, trading cooperation for leniency, so they need the buy to succeed.
• Being paid, sometimes per case or per arrest, a direct financial incentive to produce results.
• Addicted or entangled, with their own drug involvement and credibility problems.

Attacking the Informant

The informant’s history, deal, and motive are all fair game, and often decisive.

We push hard, through legal channels, to expose who this informant really is and what they were promised. That includes:

• The deal, the exact benefit the CI received, pending charges dropped, sentence reductions, or cash.
• The track record, prior cases, prior lies, and any history of fabrication or unreliable tips.
• The criminal history and drug involvement that bear on credibility.
• Whether the CI, not the defendant, initiated and drove the transaction.

In appropriate cases we can litigate to compel disclosure of information about the informant, and the State sometimes chooses to dismiss rather than reveal a CI it wants to keep using.

Was the Controlled Buy Actually Controlled?

Police procedures for controlled buys are strict, and they are frequently not followed.

A “controlled” buy is supposed to be tightly supervised: the CI is searched before and after, the money is documented, and the transaction is monitored or recorded. In reality, the controls are often loose. We examine whether:

• The CI was thoroughly searched before the buy, or could have carried in drugs to plant.
• The transaction was actually observed or recorded, or rests on the CI’s word alone.
• The audio/video is complete and unedited, or conveniently missing the key moments.
• The identity of the seller is truly established, or the CI simply named the target.

Gaps in the buy procedure are gaps in the State’s proof, and they feed directly into chain-of-custody challenges over the drugs themselves.

When Police Cross the Line

If the government induced a crime you were not predisposed to commit, that is entrapment, and it is a complete defense.

Entrapment applies when law enforcement, or an informant acting for them, induces a person to commit a crime they were not predisposed to commit. It is not entrapment merely to give someone an opportunity, but it crosses the line when police badger, pressure, appeal to sympathy, or repeatedly push a reluctant person until they give in.

In CI cases, entrapment often turns on who started it and who kept pushing. The complete, unedited communications, texts, calls, and recordings, frequently tell a very different story than the police report’s summary. We obtain and dissect all of it.

Entrapment, credibility, and buy-procedure attacks combine with the rest of our Top 10 drug defenses to dismantle a case that first looked airtight.