Grand Jury to Investigate Death of Rachel Hoffman

Grand Jury to Investigate Death of Informant
A grand jury is being convened that will investigate the controversial death of a 23-year-old Florida woman who was killed while acting as a confidential police informant in a sting operation last month.

The panel is expected to look into the case of Rachel Hoffman, whom Tallahassee city police recruited to work as a confidential informant in April after raiding her house and reportedly finding marijuana and ecstasy.

The police have said they offered Hoffman a deal: if she worked as a confidential informant, the state attorney would “decide how to balance your assistance with your crime.”

But State Attorney Willie Meggs has said his office was not informed of the deal, and it was inappropriate for police to offer such an arrangement without a prosecuting attorney involved.

Lance Block, an attorney hired by Hoffman’s father after his daughter’s death, said flatly he doesn’t believe the deal went down the way the police have described. According to friends of Hoffman’s in whom she confided, Block said, police told her she faced as much as four years in prison if she did not accept the offer.

“They told her ‘it will all go away,’ if you help us get some bad guys off the street,” Block said.

“It is my strong preference that the people who are in drug court not be around this kind of thing,” state prosecutor Owen McCaul told the Tallahassee Democrat. And a local public defender told the paper there was an “informal practice” that people in drug court don’t act as informants, “the thinking being that someone in drug court is trying to get away from drug activity and drug use.”

Hoffman was never booked into jail after the raid on her apartment. She began to work with a Tallahassee police investigator, and police have said she offered two men, Andrea Green and Deneilo Bradshaw, as possible arrest targets.

Attorney Block said Rachel had no prior relationship with the men, as he believes the police have suggested, but learned of them through an intermediary, who told her about them while she was assisting the police.

Police have confirmed they gave Hoffman $13,000 in cash and set her up to buy 1,500 hits of ecstasy, cocaine and a gun from Green and Bradshaw. A police spokesman has said he was not sure why a gun was involved.

I can tell you why there was a gun involved. These cops are trying to take down a couple of bad guys and they know that when there is a gun involved in a drug transaction, the mandatory minimums increase substantially. It’s a part of the game for them: they get a low-level pot user like Rachel, set her up with an offer she can’t refuse, and use her as the bait to catch the bigger fish. The longer those mandatory minimums, the less the defense is going to be able to plea down for a better deal.

Just how stupid could these cops be? You’re going to send a 23-year-old woman to some really bad news dealers with a history of violence on their rap sheets, and just out of the blue have her buy thirteen grand in coke and X and a handgun? Naw, that wouldn’t set off any red flags in a typical dealer’s mind.

(Follow the story of Rachel Hoffman by bookmarking this link)