How Much Immunity Do You Get By Being An Informant?

Some people out there will tell you that anyone who takes a plea deal is a chump, but most of them have never faced criminal charges punishable by imprisonment. You might even have seen billboards or late-night TV ads for criminal defense firms that promise to get you acquitted. Yes, you have the Constitutional right to a trial by jury if you are accused of a crime, and defendants who plead guilty only because lawyers, or anyone else, pressured them to do so have the right to appeal their convictions. Despite this, the law incentivizes people who are guilty as charged to confess by giving them lighter sentences than those who maintained their innocence until the end but were ultimately convicted. A plea deal is not a freebie, though. The closest thing most people can get to making their charges vanish is pretrial diversion, where they plead no contest and serve a probation sentence, at the end of which the court drops the charges, but this option is only available to first-time defendants charged with relatively minor offenses. When you take a plea deal, you still get a conviction. The state will only offer you immunity from prosecution if they desperately need your testimony to help them solve another case. Being an informant does not, however, protect you from getting future charges in cases separate from the ones where you acted as an informant. If you are being accused of drug conspiracy and prosecutors are asking you to act as an informant, contact a Tampa drug crime lawyer.

What Determines Whether the State Asks You to Be an Informant?

Most people who have acted as confidential informants do not fit the stereotypes that you see in movies about criminal investigations. They come from all walks of life, but one thing they all have in common is that they all have a reasonable fear that they would have been convicted of criminal conspiracy if they had not agreed to act as informants. This fact is the thread that runs through the many legal troubles that Jorge Hernandez has faced in his life. The DEA recruited him to be an informant in 2000, when he was in Venezuela, fleeing from his co-defendants in a drug trafficking case. He knew so much about so many drug-trafficking operations that he helped federal law enforcement seize many shipments of cocaine throughout the Americas.

In 2008, the DEA dismissed Hernandez, who was known by the nickname Boliche, which means “bowling ball,” from his informant role when evidence emerged that he had extorted money from other informants by threatening to tell their co-defendants that they had cooperated with law enforcement. Hernandez had so much information about the illegal drug trade and investigations into it, though, that the DEA later brought him back as an informant to help them investigate corruption within their ranks.

Contact Tampa Criminal Defense Attorney Bryant Scriven

A criminal defense lawyer can help you get justice if you are facing criminal charges for drug conspiracy.  Contact Scriven Law in Tampa, Florida to schedule a consultation.

Source:

cbs42.com/news/politics/ap-politics/ap-longtime-dea-informant-charged-in-alleged-scheme-to-extort-high-level-cocaine-traffickers/