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May 17, 2008 -- Tallahassee Democrat (FL)

Hoffman Case Is Latest In National Debate Over Confidential Informants

By Jennifer Portman, Democrat Senior Writer

Return to Drug War News: Don't Miss Archive

There was nothing uncommon about Tallahassee police sending Rachel Hoffman to Forestmeadows Park to buy illegal drugs and a gun from two suspected dealers.

Thousands of confidential informants help nab criminals every day. If the May 7 sting had gone as planned, the public never would have known what the 23-year-old was up to.

But the operation didn't go as planned. Hoffman, an FSU graduate facing several drug charges, agreed with the dealers to meet at nearby Royalty Plant Nursery instead. Police say they begged Hoffman not to go, but she hung up on them. Thirty-six hours later her body was found, dumped off a dirt road in Taylor County woods.

"It's the war on drugs gone crazy," said Peter Moskos, a former Baltimore cop and now assistant law professor at John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York City.

As the Florida Attorney General Office reviews how police handled the case, Hoffman's death has invited scrutiny of a clandestine, pervasive and largely unregulated aspect of law enforcement that is facing criticism nationwide. Federal agencies have implemented stricter standards about confidential informants and have improved documentation, experts say, but state and local agencies lag behind.

"This girl shouldn't be dead," Moskos said. "She shouldn't have been doing this. This is police work. She's not a cop. To hold her responsible for a buy-and-bust gone wrong is crazy."

Pressure For Drug Arrests

Law-enforcement officials say deaths like Hoffman's are tragic but confidential informants are essential to police work.

"Criminals do not tell their next-door neighbor who is a police officer what they are doing," said Willie Meggs, state attorney for the Second Judicial Circuit.

But pressure to deliver drug arrests has produced a criminal-informant culture that is cloaked in secrecy and fraught with pitfalls, said Alexandra Natapoff, a Loyola Law School professor and national expert on the subject.

"Informants are often addicted, young, frightened, vulnerable people who are looking at the ruin of their life in the threat of prosecution, and often they will do anything," said Natapoff, who testified on the issue before Congress last year. "Informants are not being treated as helpers of law enforcement but as tools of law enforcement that can be expendable."

Hoffman's case is unique, Natapoff said, because she had legal representation and her death attracted media attention.

"We don't know how many college students the Tallahassee Police Department or anyone else have turned into informants under threat of drug prosecution," she said. "The truth is we do not know the shape of this very public policy issue."

'Better Oversight'

Natapoff and others, including the American Civil Liberties Union, want information about confidential informants and the work they do to be available to the public. The FBI now keeps aggregate data on its more than 15,000 informants, but state and local agencies typically don't. State drug cases represent more than 1.5 million arrests each year, and most typically involve informants.

The Tallahassee Police Department and Leon County Sheriff's Office keep files on each of their informants, but that information is not open to the public. Friday, in response to Tallahassee Democrat requests, TPD spokesman David McCranie said the department had used 414 confidential informants since 2000. He said disclosing their ages might make some informants identifiable. The department also declined to release information about informants' gender or race.

Secrecy surrounding informants, critics say, can lead to wrongful convictions, more crime and deaths such as Hoffman's.

"At minimum, we need more data and better oversight," said Larry Spalding, ACLU legislative staff counsel in Tallahassee.

Deaths Are Rare

Timothy R. Lane, Southeast regional director of the National Narcotics Officers Association's Coalition, calls informants "a necessary evil."

"You have to protect them just like they are a member of your undercover unit," he said.

Drug busts are dangerous, but it's rare that informants die, Lane said. In 30 years dealing with informants, he's never had one killed. Officers can't force anyone to do anything, he said, and those who agree to help police typically aren't naive.

"These type of people are exposed to that kind of criminal element before we get involved with them," said Lane, who teaches law-enforcement classes on confidential sources and trains undercover officers. "A mistake was made by her. What can you do?"

Drug Enforcement Administration spokesman Michael Sanders said agents do their best to control and protect them. But informants are human.

"You can't baby-sit them all the time," said Sanders, who as an agent had a confidential source leave the country contrary to order. That source has never been seen since.

While such undercover work is inherently dangerous, he said, the Hoffman case is unusual because most drug dealers rely on intimidation.

"Your everyday drug dealer is not going to kill someone when they find out they are being snitched on," he said. "Unfortunately this case didn't go right."

Second-Guessing

Natapoff said unregulated use of confidential sources costs more than lives. The public-safety goals of the criminal-justice system itself are at risk, she said:

"We put a great deal of pressure on law enforcement when we ask for drug enforcement.... What we've done is given them an almost totally unregulated tool to produce drug busts. What do you think they are going to do? This is the beginning of a national debate, not the end of it."

State Attorney Meggs said confidential informants were around when he started in law enforcement in 1965 and they'll continue to be far into the future. While he considers Hoffman's death a tragedy, he doesn't think it illustrates a fundamental flaw in the system.

"I don't know when the dust all settles that we are going to say we need to find a new way to do this," Meggs said last week. "Everything you do, especially if it goes bad, you second-guess yourself. We all learn from these things. Of course, the cost for this lesson was pretty high."

Photo: Rachel Hoffman was killed while working as a police informer in a drug case in Tallahassee

More on Rachel Hoffman: www.mapinc.org/people/Rachel+Hoffman

Also visit our "Informants: Resources for a Snitch Culture" section.

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