House of death: feds shield snitches.

• Author: Balko, Radley
• Position: Federal Bureau of Investigation, protection of informants

DO FEDERAL police agencies exist to catch criminals or to protect them? Last July the House Judiciary Committee held hearings in response to a series of high-profile cases in which FBI informants had committed crimes, or in which the agency had protected its informants' identities by withholding evidence that could have prevented innocent people from going to prison. Wayne Murphy, the assistant director of the FBI Directorate of Intelligence, told the committee he could not promise that the FBI would notify local authorities when one of the bureau's confidential informants commits a violent crime, including murder.

In a 2005 study, the Department of Justice's inspector general looked at 120 FBI cases and found that the bureau had violated its own policies regarding the use of informants in 104 of them, or 87 percent of the time. Among the broken rules: failing to notify superiors when an informant commits an unauthorized crime, failing to properly assess an informant's reliability, and failing to conduct required performance reviews of informants.

The problem isn't limited to the FBI. In a series of articles for Narco News, Bill Conroy has investigated what may be the most disturbing informant-related story to date. The "House of Death" is the scene of at least a dozen gruesome drug-related murders in the border town of Ciudad Juarez, Mexico. Officials at U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) knew about the House of Death early on, byway of a federal drug informant named Guillermo Ramirez Peyro, recipient of more than...