Shein told me that authorities who extract extreme penalties in this and similar cases appear to have lost their reason. “I don’t understand how some of these people live with themselves,” she said. “I pray every day that one of them would have a child of their own get in trouble before they become prosecutors or judges. Just for a week. That’s all it would take.”
5
The Death of Rachel Hoffman
NOTHING MORE STARKLY DEMONSTRATES THE DESTRUCTIVENESS OF OUR DRUG laws than the vicious, grievous murder of Rachel Morningstar Hoffman.1 A psychology major who’d just graduated from Florida State University, Hoffman, age twenty-three, was on track to attend culinary school in Arizona. Friends described her as a free spirit, friendly and open, a post–hippie era hippie. Her family said that Hoffman lived her life according to the Beatles song “All You Need Is Love.” She was utterly unprepared for the nightmare world that was thrust upon her.
During a traffic stop and search in February 2007, Hoffman was caught in Tallahassee with less than an ounce of marijuana. In Florida possession of that much pot was a felony punishable by up to five years in prison. In some states her offense would have been treated like a parking ticket. In Tallahassee, however, the law looked upon her as a serious malefactor, and she ended up in drug court. She was told that by allowing this special court to monitor her, she could avoid jail time. In fact, charges would be dropped altogether if she stayed clean for a year. Advocates generally describe drug courts as a tool of reform, a way to steer users away from lives of crime or iniquity by giving them special attention. They may even have started out that way. But because of the way they’re administered, drug courts often create a precisely opposite result. Louisville, Kentucky, defense attorney Nathan Miller points to Hoffman’s fate as the perfect, tragic example of a heavy-handed “reform” that’s another sad component of an out-of-control system.
Hoffman had to surrender many of her constitutional rights to enter the program. And although logic would dictate that authorities could better use their time, fourteen months after her arrest, Tallahassee police conducted a surprise search of her apartment. They needed no warrant because she hadn’t been in the drug court diversion program for more than a year. This time they found about five ounces of marijuana and four ecstasy pills. They told her a prison sentence was certain unless she led them to other marijuana and ecstasy users. She refused to betray her friends. But trying to make the best of a bad situation, she eventually agreed to act as a confidential informant and help cops corral people committing what they told her would be serious offenses. She would have to stay in Tallahassee and defer cooking school.
Thus, a totally untrained, slight young woman was drafted as an unpaid undercover agent and charged with the task of inserting herself into the framework of criminal enterprises. The cops handling her had been trained to believe there was no essential difference between a small-time marijuana seller and a dangerous thug, so they assumed that hard-core offenders would also fail to make the distinction and that she’d blend right in. Amazingly, her handlers armed her with $13,000 in marked bills and instructed her to buy 1,500 ecstasy pills, two ounces of cocaine, and a handgun. She’d make this purchase alone and from two men she didn’t know. Police knew that at least one of the dealers had a violent criminal history. They also demanded that she wear a wire so that it would be easier for them to get a conviction. The wire, of course, magnified the danger to Hoffman.
The police gave her plenty of assurances and acted as though they knew what they were doing, and she wanted to believe them. They were the experts. She knew nothing about guns, cocaine, hidden taping devices, or undercover work. The cops may as well have pulled a random citizen off the street and parachuted her into a terrorist camp.
Hoffman was naturally excited by the crazy turn her life had taken, but we also know she was frightened and confused by the role police were forcing her to play. The day of the sting she called her father, Irv Hoffman. He had no knowledge that Tallahassee cops had his daughter under their collective thumb and were using her as bait for dangerous felons. “Dad, I’m really thinking about you today,” she told him. That was the last conversation they would ever have. She was his only child.
The men targeted by the police changed the location of the transaction at the last minute. Hoffman tried to inform her handlers about the move, but transmission was poor. Amazingly, the police weren’t tailing her and didn’t have her car in sight. They lost her when she didn’t turn into the park where they were waiting. “I have no idea where I am,” she said. Those were her last recorded words. Later the police who’d guaranteed her safety claimed that they advised her against going to the new rendezvous; they said that what resulted was her own fault. But given the faulty transmissions over the poor communications setup, it wasn’t clear that she even received their last-minute instruction. It all happened fast, there had been no rehearsal.
Two days later Hoffman’s body, clad in a Grateful Dead sweatshirt, was found in a ditch south of the city. She’d been shot five times with the .25-caliber stolen pistol that she’d been instructed to purchase. Police later arrested Deneilo Bradshaw, twenty-three, and Andrea Green, twenty-five, and charged them with murder. As word of the monumental folly seeped out and higher-ups were peppered with questions, a public information officer, David McCranie, was appointed to handle inquiries. Describing Hoffman as “very bright” and “very talented,” he took turns blaming her for poor execution of the plan and the shooters for shooting her. He mouthed a series of inapplicable slogans, such as “Safety is paramount,” and refused to concede that anyone in the department was at fault. Hoffman’s attorney, Johnny Devine, who had not been informed about his client’s undercover status, recalled that police tried “to point the arrow in every other direction. They took a defensive step from the start.”
Apparently hoping it would buttress their argument that Hoffman herself had a criminal background, authorities publicized her 2003 citation for underage drinking. They also claimed she was a major drug dealer, but as her father later pointed out, she barely had enough money to pay the rent, which doesn’t exactly fit the pattern of a major drug dealer. Friends said she and they shared small quantities of weed and sometimes ecstasy. They scoffed at the suggestion that she was a “major dealer.”
Well, McCranie said, Hoffman didn’t have to accept the confidential-informant deal. Countless other drug offenders have been offered the same deal, he said, and a “lot of people say no.” But the whole process was utterly foreign to Hoffman. Her life was hanging by a thread, and no one was watching the thread.
No matter how carefully they are screened, it’s inevitable that weak-minded or amoral people will achieve positions of authority. As long as we keep Quixotic, unjust laws on the books, harmless people will suffer. Because the law computed Hoffman’s actions as being worthy of prison time, she suspended her life and became an indentured servant in a risky trade.
The day Bradshaw was convicted of killing Hoffman, a reporter found Irv Hoffman beside his daughter’s grave. He’d brought a carrot cake, her favorite, and he sat there all day in a lawn chair. It was her birthday. She’d have been twenty-five. “She was full of life and mischief,” he said.2