Tallahassee to pay $2.6 Million settlement for Rachel Hoffman's death
The City of Tallahassee is set to pay a $2.6 Million dollar settlement for the death of Rachel Hoffman, a Florida girl who was murdered after being forced to work as an informant for Tallahassee police following her arrests for pot.
Rachel Hoffman, 23, a recent Florida State University graduate, inhabited student drug circles, but after she was busted and agreed to become a snitch in 2008, Tallahassee police sent her out into an entirely different world. They set up a "buy-bust" sting, giving Hoffman $13,000 in marked bills to buy ecstasy, cocaine, and a gun. Instead of completing the transaction, the two men targeted shot and killed her, stole the money, her credit cards, and her car, and left her body in a ditch. The killers were later caught and are now serving life sentences.
After Rachel's death, Florida passed a law that requires police who work with informants to get special training, to allow the informant to speak with an attorney, and not to promise reduced sentences to the informant. Every state should pass a similar law - the average citizen would be shocked to learn that their children, who are not hardened criminals, are being put in harm's way by police officers to do law enforcement's job for them, often at little or no benefit to the informant.
A person who is charged with simple possession or even possession with intent to distribute marijuana, with no prior record, has a fair chance of keeping this off of their record if they do not cooperate with the police and talk to an attorney instead. If they do go to work for narcotics officers, the officer will often recommend probation as their reward - telling an arrestee that they are facing x number of years and that the officer will recommend probation to the solicitor in these cases is an outright lie. Putting this type of defendant's life in danger, and forcing them to stay in the drug world when they could otherwise be staying clean, is unacceptable.
Following Rachel Hoffman's death, the Tallahassee police chief told 20/20 that:
Rachel was suspected of selling drugs and she was rightly treated as a criminal. "That's my job as a police chief to find these criminals in our community and take them off the street, to make the proper arrests," Jones told 20/20.
A similar high-profile death is in the news in Michigan, where a 19 year old transgender woman was murdered and mutilated by a drug dealer she set up for police after being arrested herself for marijuana.
