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.
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.