BISMARCK -- The North Dakota Senate gutted a bill clamping down on the use of confidential informants, according to the parents of the bill’s namesake.

House Bill 1221, also known as “Andrew’s Law,” is named for Tammy and John Sadek’s son, Andrew, a student at North Dakota State College of Science in Wahpeton who was found dead after working undercover for the police to help them make drug-dealing cases and earn himself a lighter sentence for a drug charge he faced.

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Tammy Sadek said cuts made to the bill, approved unanimously by the Senate on Thursday, March 30, hit her like a physical blow.

“I felt beaten,” she said before the afternoon vote.

"They think everything is just fine the way it is," Sadek said of state senators after Thursday's vote. "Obviously it's not just fine. I don't have a son anymore."

Her son’s death followed a chain of events that began after he was caught selling a small amount of marijuana to a friend and was recruited by law enforcement to work as a confidential informant. Two months after he went missing in May 2014, his body was found in Minnesota with a backpack of rocks tied around his waist and a gunshot to his head.

Autopsy results were inconclusive, but the Sadeks maintain their son was murdered as the result of his work as a confidential informant, a job they say authorities coerced him into taking.

Sadek’s death has drawn national attention to how police use informants, including a segment on “60 Minutes.” His parents have also filed a wrongful death lawsuit that’s still pending against Richland County and Jason Weber, the sheriff’s deputy who recruited Sadek.

In a 92-0 vote last month, the North Dakota House passed HB 1221, initially an eight-page document outlining new protocols on how confidential informants can be used, including a list of informant’s rights. Under the bill’s original language, campus and university police would be barred from using confidential informants, and police would be required to tell defendants they that they have a right to talk to a lawyer before agreeing to the undercover work.

The Senate Judiciary Committee, after a March 21 hearing at which several law enforcement officials testified against the proposal, cut the bill to two pages and replaced original provisions with “a loose and unspecific requirement” directing the Bureau of Criminal Investigations provide guidelines and training, the Sadeks said in a statement released Thursday.

“My husband and I are frankly appalled to see the obvious gutting of this important legislation,” Tammy Sadek said, adding that while her family appreciates efforts to back the bill, the current version “is weak” and “not what it needs to be.”

Tammy Sadek said she hopes the bill will end up in a conference committee, where House and Senate lawmakers would hash out the differences between the versions the two chambers passed. She wants people to contact their House representatives and "get them to stand their ground."

“We’ve dedicated ourselves over the last several years to shining light on these potentially dangerous confidential informant programs so that other families won’t have to endure what we have. These laws need to be changed, it’s that simple,” Tammy Sadek said in the statement.

The bill's primary sponsor, Rep. Rick Becker, R-Bismarck, was skeptical that lawmakers could find a middle ground on the bill, given the vast differences between the House and Senate versions.

"The whole idea was we need to give protections to people," he said. "And the way the way the bill has come out of the Senate, I don't believe we have given protections any more that what people currently have."

Sen. Kelly Armstrong, R-Dickinson, chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, was more optimistic about a compromise.

Armstrong said the original bill was very specific and made it "almost impossible" to use confidential informants. He predicted the bill would end up in conference committee and his goal is to have a bill that is both "protecting people who are doing confidential informant buys and also is workable so that it doesn't become a tool" that law enforcement can't use.

"It will be significantly different than either the first one or the second one, but we'll get a bill done," Armstrong said. "I'm working on a redraft right now."