The high court held that reliance on informant testimony implicates neither the Fourth Amendment’s protection from unreasonable searches and seizures nor the Fifth Amendment’s protection against self-incrimination.Īs a result, law enforcement often exploit testimony from confidential informants, or CIs.
#Confidential informant list free#
United States - made clear that police have a relatively free hand to use informants. In the 1960s, a trio of Supreme Court decisions - Hoffa v. The use of informants by police is essentially unregulated by the courts. The fatal raid on Tuttle and Nicholas could not have happened but for three frequently-intersecting problems in policing: heavy reliance on confidential informants, inadequate mechanisms to identify when police officers or informants lie, and hyper-aggressive police raids using militarized tactics. Later, however, it became clear that the narcotics officer was lying: the drug buy had never happened, and there is no evidence the confidential informant even existed in the first place. There was no heroin, no piles of cash, no scales or other drug paraphernalia-nothing to suggest that the Tuttles were anything more than a couple who sometimes chose to get high in their own home.Ĭourt documents released afterward showed that the raid was based on just two pieces of evidence: a phone call from Nicholas’s mother to police expressing concern that her daughter was doing drugs and a narcotics officer’s description of a “controlled buy” in which the confidential informant bought drugs from the Tuttles while he watched.
After police searched the bloodied home, though, all they found were personal-use amounts of marijuana and cocaine. But the men who gunned down this couple weren’t arrested afterward, because they were police officers executing a warrant to find drugs.Ī judge signed the warrant authorizing this deadly raid because narcotics officers asserted that Tuttle and Nicholas were dealing heroin from their home.
They responded by killing both Tuttle and Nicholas. Nicholas grabbed at the shotgun being carried by one of the men. Tuttle, a Navy veteran, came from the rear of the house and began shooting at the armed intruders, wounding five of them. One of the couple’s dogs ran at the men, who immediately opened fire and killed the dog. Like many Texans, Tuttle and Nicholas kept guns in their home.
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