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Stash-House Stings Carry Real Penalties for Fake Crimes
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2021/10/18/stash-house-stings-carry-real-penalties-for-fake-crimesIn the past four decades, sting operations of all types have become a major part of law enforcement in the United States, and stash-house stings are perhaps the most extreme example of this trend, because of the harsh penalties they carry. They can result in longer sentences than real crimes of a similar nature. Defendants like Boyer are often surprised to learn that the government has a nearly limitless ability to deceive. “Compared with traditional police practices, undercover methods are relatively unhindered by constitutional or legislative restrictions,” Georg Wagner, a U.S. Secret Service agent, wrote in a 2007 policy analysis. “There are no clear legal limitations on the length of the operation, the intimacy of the relationships formed, the degree of deception used and the degree of temptation offered and the number of times it is offered.” No judge is required to sign a warrant, and law-enforcement officials do not have to provide any evidence that a person is already engaged in criminal activity before initiating an undercover investigation.
Boyer spent six months in a holding cell at a Tampa jail, furious and confused, shivering as he went through withdrawal. He remained certain that a jury would be outraged by the A.T.F.’s conduct. At the trial, that summer, Zayas wore a dark suit and a tie, his hair drawn back in a ponytail. He testified that the A.T.F. had targeted known criminals who made an art of robbing drug dealers. “This isn’t a type of crime you’re going to commit the first time out of the gate,” Zayas said. “When we get involved in these type of cases, these individuals are violent.” Boyer saw that, just as Zayas had convinced the defendants, he was now convincing the jury. “I felt like the fix was in for me,” Boyer said. He was convicted on all counts, and sentenced to twenty-four years in prison. “Twenty-four years for a conversation,” he said. “It was like I was living in an alternate reality.”
Boyer was sent to prison in Pekin, Illinois, where everything seemed cold and hard: the concrete floors and the iron bars, the steel bed frame that left him with bruises. Two weeks into his sentence, another inmate hit him in the face with a padlock inside a sock, mistakenly believing that Boyer had stolen his radio. Boyer sought out the law library, a windowless room with a single working typewriter, hoping to find a way to fight his conviction. “I thought that my only way out of prison was to take this on and understand everything about it,” he told me. He piled law books onto a reading table made from one of the old wooden cell doors that had been in use until a riot led the warden to replace them with metal ones.
(snip)
Many people caught in these plots initially assume that they have been entrapped, but the popular understanding of entrapment is far from the legal standard. The concept doesn’t appear anywhere in the Constitution. The Supreme Court first recognized the defense in Sorrells v. United States, a 1932 case in which a Prohibition agent posing as a furniture dealer persuaded a North Carolina man to sell him a half gallon of whiskey. That case laid the foundation for the Court’s “subjective test” of entrapment, which emphasizes the suspect’s state of mind. If a person is “predisposed” to commit the crime—prior convictions, drug addiction, and even poverty could qualify as predispositions—then almost any degree of government involvement is permitted. A sting usually doesn’t count as entrapment even if agents conceived, financed, and helped execute the plan.
Boyer spent six months in a holding cell at a Tampa jail, furious and confused, shivering as he went through withdrawal. He remained certain that a jury would be outraged by the A.T.F.’s conduct. At the trial, that summer, Zayas wore a dark suit and a tie, his hair drawn back in a ponytail. He testified that the A.T.F. had targeted known criminals who made an art of robbing drug dealers. “This isn’t a type of crime you’re going to commit the first time out of the gate,” Zayas said. “When we get involved in these type of cases, these individuals are violent.” Boyer saw that, just as Zayas had convinced the defendants, he was now convincing the jury. “I felt like the fix was in for me,” Boyer said. He was convicted on all counts, and sentenced to twenty-four years in prison. “Twenty-four years for a conversation,” he said. “It was like I was living in an alternate reality.”
Boyer was sent to prison in Pekin, Illinois, where everything seemed cold and hard: the concrete floors and the iron bars, the steel bed frame that left him with bruises. Two weeks into his sentence, another inmate hit him in the face with a padlock inside a sock, mistakenly believing that Boyer had stolen his radio. Boyer sought out the law library, a windowless room with a single working typewriter, hoping to find a way to fight his conviction. “I thought that my only way out of prison was to take this on and understand everything about it,” he told me. He piled law books onto a reading table made from one of the old wooden cell doors that had been in use until a riot led the warden to replace them with metal ones.
(snip)
Many people caught in these plots initially assume that they have been entrapped, but the popular understanding of entrapment is far from the legal standard. The concept doesn’t appear anywhere in the Constitution. The Supreme Court first recognized the defense in Sorrells v. United States, a 1932 case in which a Prohibition agent posing as a furniture dealer persuaded a North Carolina man to sell him a half gallon of whiskey. That case laid the foundation for the Court’s “subjective test” of entrapment, which emphasizes the suspect’s state of mind. If a person is “predisposed” to commit the crime—prior convictions, drug addiction, and even poverty could qualify as predispositions—then almost any degree of government involvement is permitted. A sting usually doesn’t count as entrapment even if agents conceived, financed, and helped execute the plan.
FTP. A system that relies on creating criminals cannot be reformed.
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