International Herald Tribune
05-23-2007
There are three ''rats of the week'' on the home page of whosarat.com, a Web site devoted to exposing the identities of witnesses cooperating with the U.S. government. The site posts their names and mug shots, along with court documents detailing what they have agreed to do in exchange for lenient sentences.Last week, for instance, the site featured a Florida man who agreed in September to plead guilty to cocaine possession but not gun charges in exchange for committing to work ''in an undercover role to contact and negotiate with sources of controlled substances.''The site says it has identified 4,300 informers and 400 undercover agents, many of them from documents obtained from files available on the Internet.''The reality is this,'' said a spokesman for the site, who identified himself as Anthony Capone. ''Everybody has a choice in life about what they want to do for a living. Nobody likes a tattletale.''Prosecutors are furious, and the Justice Department has begun urging the federal courts to make fundamental changes in public access to electronic court files by removing all plea agreements from them - whether involving cooperating witnesses or not.''We are witnessing the rise of a new cottage industry engaged in republishing court filings about cooperators on Web sites such as www.whosarat.com for the clear purpose of witness intimidation, retaliation and harassment,'' a Justice Department official wrote in a December letter to the Judicial Conference of the United States, the administrative and policy-making body of the U.S. court system.In one case described in the letter, a witness in Philadelphia was moved and the FBI was asked to investigate after material from whosarat.com was mailed to his neighbors and posted on utility poles and cars in the area.A federal court in Miami has provisionally adopted the department's recommendation to remove plea agreements from electronic files, and other courts are considering it and experimenting with alternative approaches.John Tunheim, a judge in Minneapolis and the chairman of a Judicial Conference committee studying the issue, acknowledged the gravity of the safety threat posed by the Web sites but said it would be better addressed through case-by-case actions.''We are getting a pretty significant push from the Justice Department to take plea agreements off the electronic file entirely,'' Tunheim said. ''But it is important to have our files accessible. I really do not want to see a situation in which plea agreements are routinely sealed or kept out of the electronic record.''Tunheim said his committee was working on recommendations for a nationwide approach to the issue. He said he favored putting the details of a witness's cooperation into a separate document and sealing only that document, or keeping it from the court file entirely.For those who want details on cooperating witnesses, whosarat.com charges $7.99 for a week to $89.99 for life. The latter option includes a free ''Stop Snitching'' T-shirt.The site was started by Sean Bucci in 2004, after he was indicted in Boston on marijuana charges based on information from an informant. The site was initially modest and free, the seeming product of a drug defendant's fit of pique. Over time, it attracted thousands of postings, many backed by court documents.Bucci was convicted in February and will be sentenced next month. Stylianus Sinnis, a lawyer for Bucci, who is incarcerated, would not say whether his client was still affiliated with the site.Contacted by e-mail, Capone called a reporter at an arranged time. He would not provide his phone number but insisted that his name was authentic. He said Bucci was no longer associated with the site.The site itself says it is ''designed to assist attorneys and criminal defendants with few resources.''The site says that it ''does not promote or condone violence or illegal activity against informants or law enforcement officers.''Frank Bowman, a former prosecutor who teaches law at the University of Missouri, disputed that. ''It's reprehensible and very dangerous,'' Bowman said of the site. ''People are going to die as a result of this.''Defendants who choose to go to trial eventually learn the identities of the witnesses who testify against them. But the site also discloses the identities of people engaged in undercover operations and those whose information is merely used to build a case. The widespread dissemination of informants' identities could subject them to retribution from friends and associates of the defendant.Still, Bowman said he would hate to see the routine sealing of plea agreements. ''It certainly is terribly important for the public ultimately to know who's flipped,'' he said.
2007 Copyright International Herald Tribune. http://www.iht.com
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