Pubdate: Mon, 26 Aug 2013
Source: Philadelphia Daily News (PA)
Copyright: 2013 Philadelphia Newspapers Inc.
Contact: http://www.philly.com/dailynews/about/feedback/
Website: http://www.philly.com/dailynews/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/339
Author: Jason Nark

OSTRACIZED

The Deal She Made With Police Turned This Activist into an Outcast

THE DRUG WAR paid a visit to Stacy Litz's Powelton Village apartment 
on a Thursday afternoon, armed with a warrant, handcuffs and an offer.

It was September 2011, and Litz was well-aware that any deal, even a 
nickel bag of weed, could make her a target, but she'd chosen sides 
long before the law came knocking on Baring Street. Litz was a 
political-science major at nearby Drexel University at the time, 
fully engaged in libertarian and anarchist causes, denouncing 
government for poking around in private lives.

Litz, now 23, said that she purchased psychedelics off the Internet 
to use and sell to friends, that she wasn't a kingpin by any means. 
But one customer who bought LSD from her turned out to be an 
undercover officer with the State Police.

"I thought to myself, 'Oh wow, this is happening.' They didn't have 
their guns drawn or anything. They offered me coffee. They were being 
nice," Litz said, recalling her arrest during a recent interview with 
the Daily News.

The bust didn't make Litz an outcast among her peers in the Students 
for Liberty, the Drexel Student Liberty Front, the Center for a 
Stateless Society or the larger, worldwide libertarian community with 
which she interacted online.

The decision she made after her arrest did that.

"The police said, 'If you work with us, you can still get out of 
this,' " she recalled. Her interview with the People Paper provides a 
rare glimpse into the life of a former confidential informant.

Litz faced 13 felony charges and a choice, and the Lehigh Valley 
native agreed to become "drafted into the drug war," she said, hoping 
it would persuade a judge to later be lenient. She said she 
orchestrated one small deal for prescription drugs in March 2012, and 
she was sentenced to five years' probation and community service in 
May in Montgomery County, where she initially sold the drugs.

Litz, who grew up in Easton, graduated from Drexel while working as 
an informant. She briefly attended Widener University School of Law. 
She says her family never knew about her arrest.

Today she works as a wedding officiant, pet sitter and fitness 
instructor, trying to reconnect with the activist community she said 
shunned her. She authored a blog about being a "victim of the drug 
war" and wants to shed more light on the use of confidential 
informants, a process she said is undocumented, potentially dangerous 
and often just not worth it.

"It was terrible," she said. "It was like a sick game."

The 'X' in the equation

Police told Litz that she wouldn't be paid for her work, and she 
assumed that her identity would be protected. It didn't take long, 
however, for everyone involved in her lone deal as informant to 
figure out that she was the "X" in the equation, she said.

Her name spread across the Internet, on Facebook and on libertarian 
forums and blogs, her story included as a cautionary tale about 
whether a "snitch" can be rehabilitated in a booklet called Rats! 
Your guide to protecting yourself against snitches, informers, 
informants, agents, provocateurs, narcs, finks, and similar vermin.

"No one wants to know the whole story," she said of her detractors. 
"No one can put themselves in my shoes."

Mike Salvi, who runs a Philly meetup group called "Truth, Freedom, 
Prosperity," has spoken to Litz, understands her story and believes 
that she just needs to live with her decisions. When it comes to 
regaining the trust of her former circles, her actions, he said, will 
speak louder than her apologies.

"I have very little sympathy for her," he said. "But I'm not coldhearted."

The Montgomery County District Attorney's Office would neither 
confirm nor deny whether Litz was an informant, or discuss its 
confidential-informant guidelines or how often informants are used in 
criminal investigations. The Pennsylvania State Police and the 
Philadelphia District Attorney's Office also declined to comment on 
their guidelines.

Lawyers who worked on Litz's case declined to comment. But Marc Neff, 
a Philadelphia criminal-defense lawyer, said that informant work is 
often murky and that any potential benefits are merely promises.

"It's very nonspecific in terms of what they're expecting from an 
informant, except that more is better," Neff said.

Litz said she initially was busted in 2011 because of a confidential 
informant, and experts say informants are embedded like invisible 
soldiers in all levels of narcotics investigations.

"Our criminal system is a negotiated one, and becoming a CI is just 
one more negotiation in the system," said Alexandra Natapoff, a law 
professor at Loyola Law School in Los Angeles and author of the book 
Snitching: Criminal Informants and the Erosion of American Justice.

Natapoff said few former informants ever come forward to denounce the 
system - as Litz is doing - because of the stigma and potential 
threats of being exposed.

"It is a despised class, because they are not whistle-blowers," 
Natapoff said. "It's very hard to be sympathetic to them, but only 
the government can make an informant. It's the government dangling a 
universal offer to every offender, saying, 'No matter what you've 
done, we'll cut you a deal.' There's no kind of offense, no matter 
how heinous or disgusting, the government is not willing to work a deal on."

A murdered informant

The story of Rachel Hoffman, a 23-year-old Florida woman, is the 
worst-case scenario, Natapoff said. Hoffman became an informant for 
police in Tallahassee after being arrested with marijuana and MDMA 
(Ecstasy) in 2008. She was murdered a short time later during a 
botched drug sting set up by her handlers.

The work never seemed dangerous for Litz, but she doesn't think she 
did all that much for her own handlers. They were difficult to get in 
touch with, she said - always busy with other cases, and always 
wanting something higher up the drug chain. The man she set up did 
not return requests for an interview.

As a first-time offender, Litz wondered whether she would have gotten 
probation on her case, regardless of whether she became an informant.

"I really don't know if it mattered," she said.

Litz said that she had not felt guilty about buying or using drugs, 
or felt that she was harming anyone. But that changed when she flipped sides.

"This is the only time I actually felt I really hurt somebody," Litz 
said. "It was a lose-lose situation."
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