Rachel Hoffman, 23, was caught by police with five ounces of marijuana and a few ecstasy and Valium pills. The authorities offered her a deal: they wouldn’t charge her for a crime that could send her to jail, they said, if she helped law enforcement bring down some bigger dealers. With no undercover experience, she agreed to become a confidential informant. She was murdered in the course of a drug deal she did under law enforcement direction. Hoffman’s story is part of a Lesley Stahl investigation into the controversial use of young, small-time drug dealers as untrained undercover informants in the war on drugs.
this happens a lot, and it’s by far one of the more negligent practices the police employ in the war on drugs.
They tell the accused that they’ll get a shorter sentence, better treatment, etc. if they cooperate with the police investigation, then send untrained and unprepared people straight into the lion’s den. Far, FAR too often the sting goes awry and the accused either ends up being killed, injured, or held hostage. Women who agree often get raped because of it.
When it goes wrong, it’s common for the police to try to sweep the entire thing under the rug and pretend they had nothing to do with it. Posing it like some junkie got attacked during a deal.
Worst of all, the contract isn’t binding and can be immediately overturned by a judge, or argued out by the prosecutor. Though, is often just forgotten about by the same cops that got the accused to agree to it, and never mentioned to anyone. Our prisons are full of non-violent criminals who were charged with possession, cooperated with the police in their investigations, but gained nothing from it. It’s disgusting.
Its so deeply fucked up, and it takes cases like this to remind us how pervasive this practice is. The cops coerce petty small time criminals to do literally the most dangerous part of their job, for free, and then the cops still usually lock them up if they outlive their usefulness, or get murdered in the process.
Everything about the US justice system resembles medieval torture: the forced confessions, the sentencing, the conditions, the forced labor. Burn it to the ground.
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