Pubdate: Sun, 25 Nov 2012
Source: Dallas Morning News (TX)
Copyright: 2012 Sarah Stillman
Contact: http://www.dallasnews.com/cgi-bin/lettertoed.cgi
Website: http://www.dallasnews.com/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/117
Author: Sarah Stillman
Note: Sarah Stillman is a freelance journalist and visiting scholar 
at NYU's Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute. Her website is 
stillmanjournalism.wordpress.com. This essay is excerpted from an 
article originally published in the Sept. 3, 2012, issue of The New 
Yorker magazine. .

YOUNG PAWNS IN THE DRUG WAR

Police are enlisting youthful offenders for work that's risky, 
unregulated and sometimes deadly, says Sarah Stillman

On the evening of May 7, 2008, a 23-year-old woman named Rachel 
Hoffman got into her silver Volvo sedan, put on calming jam-band 
music, and headed north to a public park in Tallahassee, Fla. A 
recent graduate of Florida State, she was dressed to blend into a 
crowd: jeans, T-shirt, black Reef flip-flops. On the passenger seat 
beside her was a handbag that contained $13,000 in marked bills.

Before she reached the Georgia peach stands and Tupelo honey venders 
on North Meridian Road, she texted her boyfriend. "I just got wired 
up," she wrote at 6:34 p.m. "Wish me luck I'm on my way."

Behind the park's oaks and blooming crape myrtles, the sun was 
beginning to set. As Hoffman spoke on her iPhone to the man she was 
on her way to meet, her voice was filtered through a wire that was 
hidden in her purse. "I'm pulling into the park with the tennis 
courts now," she said, sounding casual.

Perhaps what put her at ease was the knowledge that 19 law 
enforcement agents were tracking her every move and that a Drug 
Enforcement Administration surveillance plane was circling overhead. 
In any case, Hoffman was by nature laid-back and trusting. She was 
not a trained narcotics operative. On her Facebook page you could see 
her dancing at music festivals with a big, goofy smile, and the faux 
profile she'd made for her cat ("Favorite music: cat stevens, 
straycat blues, pussycat dolls").

A few weeks earlier, police officers had arrived at her apartment 
after someone complained about the smell of marijuana and voiced 
suspicion that she was selling drugs. When they asked if she had any 
illegal substances inside, Hoffman said yes and allowed them in to 
search. The cops seized slightly more than 5 ounces of pot and 
several Ecstasy and Valium pills, tucked beneath the cushions of her couch.

Hoffman could face serious prison time for felony charges. The 
officer in charge told her that she might be able to help herself if 
she provided "substantial assistance" to the city's narcotics team. 
She believed that any charges against her could be reduced, or even dropped.

Hoffman's legal worries were augmented by the fact that this wasn't 
her first drug offense. A year earlier, while she was a senior, 
police pulled her over for speeding and found almost an ounce of 
marijuana in her car. She was ordered into a substance abuse program, 
which required regular drug testing. Later, after failing to report 
for a test, she spent three days in jail.

Hoffman chose to cooperate. She had never fired a gun or handled a 
significant stash of hard drugs. Now she was on her way to conduct a 
major undercover deal for the Tallahassee Police Department, meeting 
two felons alone in her car to buy 21/2 ounces of cocaine, 1,500 
Ecstasy pills and a semi-automatic handgun.

The operation did not go as intended. By the end of the hour, police 
lost track of her and her car.

Two days later, her body was found in Perry, Fla., a small town 50 
miles southeast of Tallahassee, in a ravine overgrown with tangled 
vines. She had been shot five times in the chest and head with the 
gun that the police had sent her to buy.

By the evening of her death, Hoffman had been working for the Police 
Department for almost three weeks. In bureaucratic terms, she was 
Confidential Informant No. 1129, or C.I. Hoffman. In legal parlance, 
she was a "cooperator," one of thousands of people who, each year, 
help the police build cases against others, often in exchange for a 
promise of leniency in the criminal justice system.

Informants are the foot soldiers in the government's war on drugs. By 
some estimates, up to 80 percent of drug cases in America involve 
them, often in active roles like Hoffman's. For police departments 
facing budget woes, untrained CI's provide an inexpensive way to 
outsource the work of undercover officers.

"The system makes it cheap and easy to use informants, as opposed to 
other, less risky but more cumbersome approaches," says Alexandra 
Natapoff, a professor at Loyola Law School in Los Angeles and a 
leading expert on informants. "There are fewer procedures in place 
and fewer institutional checks on their use." Often, deploying 
informants involves no paperwork and no institutional oversight, let 
alone lawyers, judges or public scrutiny; their use is necessarily 
shrouded in secrecy.

Every day, offenders are sent out to perform high-risk police 
operations with few legal protections. Some are juveniles, 
occasionally as young as 14. Some operate through the haze of 
addiction; others, like Hoffman, are enrolled in state-mandated 
treatment programs that prohibit their association with illegal drugs 
of any kind. Many have been given false assurances by the police, 
used without regard for their safety, and treated as disposable pawns 
of the criminal justice system.

The recruitment of young informants often involves risks that are 
incommensurate with the charges that they are facing. And the costs 
of cooperating can be high. A case that has dragged on for years in 
the courts involved LeBron Gaither, a 16-year-old student at a public 
high school in Lebanon, Ky. One afternoon, Gaither, who, according to 
his family, was generally mild-mannered, had an outburst in which he 
punched the school's assistant principal in the jaw. He was taken 
into custody for juvenile assault. An officer from the Kentucky State 
Police came to see him and told him that he could face a prison term 
or he could agree to become a local drug informant.

Gaither signed the paperwork and soon found himself performing 
undercover drug stings in two counties. After one of these stings, 
Gaither, by then 18, was called on to testify before a grand jury 
against Jason Noel, a local drug dealer he'd set up. The next day, 
the police sent Gaither out with a wire and cash to buy still more 
drugs from Noel, a decision that one state attorney later called the 
most "reckless, stupid and idiotic idea" he had seen in his 19 years 
of legal work.

Shortly after the sting began, however, detectives lost track of 
Gaither when Noel, who had learned of the teen's testimony from a 
grand juror, drove off with him. Gaither was tortured, beaten with a 
bat, shot with a pistol and a shotgun, run over by a car and dragged 
by a chain through the woods.

When his family learned what had happened, they sued. In 2009, after 
years of bureaucratic delay, they won $168,000 in a wrongful-death 
case, but the award was vacated; this past May, the state court of 
appeals ruled that although Gaither's use as an informant was 
"tragically flawed," the police could not be held accountable because 
the "execution of the undercover operation was left to the judgment 
and discretion of the detectives." The family hopes to take the case 
to the state Supreme Court.

I heard statements of outrage dozens of times in the course of more 
than 70 interviews with people whose lives have been shaped by 
America's growing reliance on young drug informants: narcotics 
officers, prosecutors, defense attorneys and the friends and families 
of murdered CI's, as well as some former informants. Occasionally, 
concerns about the practice were prompted by law enforcement agents 
who fear that pressures to rack up revenue-generating drug busts pose 
challenges with which their departments can't keep pace.

More often, questions about why informant use remains so unregulated 
came from parents who have lost a child to the practice. Within their 
ranks, the parents of Rachel Hoffman have become folk heroes of 
sorts. After Rachel's murder, more than four years ago, Irv Hoffman, 
a mental health counselor, and Margie Weiss, a registered nurse and 
massage therapist, joined together in order to reform the way young 
amateurs are used in the war on drugs - first in the state of 
Florida, and now, if they and parents like them have their way, 
across the country.

 From the beginning, Hoffman's parents were concerned that 
authorities weren't telling them the full story behind their 
daughter's disappearance. Around 2:30 on the morning after the 
bungled sting, Margie and Irv received calls from police asking if 
they'd heard from Rachel. The department called again later that 
morning, urging both parents to come to Tallahassee; Rachel still 
hadn't been found, they said, making no mention of the botched drug 
bust or of Rachel's recruitment as a CI.

At the headquarters of the Tallahassee Police Department, Chief 
Dennis Jones repeated what they already knew: "Rachel's missing." 
Jones then assured them that an aggressive search was under way and 
instructed them to go to their daughter's apartment and await further updates.

Only then, when they turned on the television and scanned the news 
for updates, did they discover that Rachel had "provided assistance 
during a police operation" and that officials suspected "foul play" 
in her disappearance. Police were looking for two suspects, Andrea 
Green and Deneilo Bradshaw.

Just after dawn the next day, their worst fears were confirmed: 
Rachel's body had been found. Later that morning, journalists 
descended on a forest clearing where Tallahassee Police Department 
officials were holding a news conference.

"We had established protocols in place to ensure her safety," Officer 
David McCranie told the crowd. "At some point during the 
investigation, she chose not to follow the instructions. She met 
Green and Bradshaw on her own. That meeting ultimately resulted in 
her murder."

This marked, for Irv Hoffman, the beginning of what he sometimes 
refers to as "the smearing" - the period following Rachel's murder 
during which their daughter was portrayed in police statements and 
front-page news stories as, in his words, "this horrible drug-dealing 
monster."

Two months later, in a TV segment on Hoffman's death, ABC News 
correspondent Brian Ross interviewed Police Chief Jones. "I'm calling 
her a criminal," Jones told him. "That's my job as a police chief - 
to find these criminals in our community and take them off the 
street, to make the proper arrests." Ross asked about the 
department's accountability. "Do we feel responsible?" Jones said. 
"We're responsible for the safety of this community."

Around 2 one morning a few weeks after Rachel's death, Irv Hoffman 
began jotting notes. Almost daily since his daughter's murder, he had 
woken up in the early hours, turning over the details of the botched 
drug bust in his mind. He began typing out a list: Why was Rachel 
used in such a high-risk police sting when she had no training? Why 
was she sent to buy a semi-automatic pistol when she had never even 
fired a weapon? Why was she pressured into taking part in the 
operation before she consulted a lawyer?

Hoffman set about turning his questions into a wish list of policy 
reforms. He and Weiss began working on what they called Rachel's Law. 
They appealed to the father of one of Rachel's friends, a Florida 
attorney named Lance Block, to guide them through the process.

Block, Hoffman and Weiss swiftly worked out the particulars. First, 
all CI's should be given the right to counsel; Miranda and Sixth 
Amendment rights often don't apply to informants, since they may 
never be formally arrested or charged with a crime. Second, there 
should be a provision banning the use of juveniles altogether. Third, 
there should be "offense parity" - nonviolent, low-level drug 
offenders should not be used in apprehending traffickers with 
histories of violence. Fourth, people who are in drug treatment 
programs, as Rachel was, shouldn't be used at all. A range of other 
provisions were also suggested.

In August, soon after they'd begun putting the bill together, they 
got a dramatic boost. A grand jury charged with reviewing the facts 
of the Hoffman case not only indicted the two murder suspects, Green 
and Bradshaw, but also took the highly unusual step of issuing a 
scathing condemnation of the Police Department's conduct. (Green and 
Bradshaw are now serving life sentences for the Hoffman murder; 
Bradshaw recently appealed.)

After this, the Police Department began to acknowledge that it had 
made mistakes. An internal affairs investigation revealed that police 
officers had committed at least 21 violations of nine separate 
policies in Hoffman's case.

This was an ideal moment for Hoffman's parents to make a bold 
proposal. Two Republican politicians agreed to sponsor Rachel's Law, 
and committee meetings were held. Yet the reforms proved to have 
formidable opponents. The Florida Department of Law Enforcement, the 
Florida Sheriffs Association and other groups lobbied against the 
law, and more than a hundred law enforcement agents packed the 
meetings. Many vice cops, in particular, argued that the 
right-to-an-attorney clause would make it far too cumbersome to catch 
and "flip" drug suspects on the spot, effectively nullifying a 
valuable, real-time tactic for fighting crime.

Eventually, a compromise bill was put forward, stripped of several of 
the earlier provisions, including the informant's unequivocal right 
to legal counsel and the measure to exclude juveniles. But even the 
revised version promised groundbreaking rights and regulations for informants.

On May 7, 2009, the anniversary of Hoffman's murder, Gov. Charlie 
Crist signed Rachel's Law. It became the first comprehensive 
legislation of its kind in the nation. Even so, Hoffman's parents 
have vowed to continue working to strengthen it.

And earlier this year, Weiss and Hoffman won another major victory: a 
$2.6 million settlement from the city of Tallahassee in a 
wrongful-death lawsuit - along with a formal apology. Now they hope 
to take their campaign beyond Florida and broaden their push for 
regulations of the kind that might have saved their daughter. In the 
meantime, their public example and the media coverage surrounding it 
have inspired other family members of victimized CI's across the 
country to seek redress.

But redress doesn't necessarily bring closure. Every morning, Irv 
Hoffman drives to Rachel's grave, carrying his supplies in the trunk: 
a bottle of water for Rachel's flowers, a pair of scissors to freshen 
their stems, a beach chair to sit in and read beside his daughter's 
memorial bench. Sometimes, he reads from the letter that Rachel wrote 
him on the evening before she left for college. On a recent 
afternoon, he showed me the letter, which he had laminated and placed 
on his coffee table. He picked it up and began to read: "To my hero, 
Dad, where do I even begin?"

Irv paused to collect himself. It's this letter, more than almost 
anything else, that makes Irv feel the weight of the years ahead, 
when he expected to be an active father and grandfather but instead 
finds himself endlessly turning over the details of a botched CI 
operation. "Dad, please don't worry about me," he continued to read 
aloud. "I'm a very smart, independent girl and I do have morals and 
ethics you've taught me, which will not be left at home. Have Faith, 
Old Man, I' ll be just fine." 
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