HOFFMAN CASE IS LATEST IN NATIONAL DEBATE OVER CONFIDENTIAL INFORMANTS

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."