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Stories filed under: "stings"

Appeals Court Judge Tears Into ATF's Life-Wrecking, Discriminatory Stash House Stings

from the more-of-this-please dept

The ATF’s stash house stings are one of the worst things about federal law enforcement. And it’s a crowded field! Sure, the FBI routinely engages in something approaching entrapment when it turns people with self-esteem problems and/or serious mental health issues into terrorists. But the FBI can’t tell a judge how much terrorism to charge defendants with. The ATF stings — involving imaginary drugs hidden in fictitious stash houses — give the government the ability to trigger mandatory minimum sentences simply by claiming the fake stash of drugs was more than five kilos — automatically setting up defendants for 20-year prison terms.

Another victim of the ATF’s stash house stings is fighting his conviction in court. Daryle Lamont Sellers hopes to prove the ATF’s stash house stings are racially-biased. There’s some evidence this is the case. Researchers found sting operations in Chicago netted a disproportionate number of minority suspects. A review of hundreds of court cases by the USA Today showed the ATF targeted minorities 91% of the time.

Sellers says the ATF is engaging in selective enforcement. To do that, he needs information the ATF has on hand, but is refusing to hand over. The Ninth Circuit Appeals Court has declared Sellers should have access to this information because the claim he’s making isn’t the same as selective prosecution, which requires Sellers to show more than he has in this case. From the decision [PDF]:

To succeed on his selective enforcement claim, Sellers must show that the enforcement had a discriminatory effect and was motivated by a discriminatory purpose. He is unlikely to meet this demanding standard without information that only the government has. Sellers can obtain this information through discovery if he makes a threshold showing. We must decide what that showing is. We hold that in these stash house reverse-sting cases, claims of selective enforcement are governed by a less rigorous standard than that applied to claims of selective prosecution under United States v. Armstrong, 517 U.S. 456 (1996).

This is good news for Sellers. And it’s potentially good news for others roped in by ATF stings. If he obtains information showing discriminatory motivation, minority suspects are going to have another way to fight these charges in court.

But the entire opinion is worth reading past the opening declaration in favor of Sellers. Judge Jacqueline Nguyen tees off on the ATF in her concurring opinion, pointing out biased enforcement is only a small part of stash house sting operations’ problems.

While these operations do “not . . . reduc[e] the actual flow of drugs,”2 the government touts them as an important tool “to catch people inclined to commit home invasions.” United States v. Hudson, 3 F. Supp. 3d 772, 786 (C.D. Cal. 2014), rev’d sub nom. United States v. Dunlap, 593 F. App’x 619 (9th Cir. 2014). But when the government fails to target known criminal enterprises or people suspected of engaging in serious crimes, the practice is highly questionable and raises troubling questions about race-based targeting.

There is no legitimate dispute that these stings primarily affect people of color, but the government has steadfastly resisted any defense attempt to determine whether enforcement is racially biased.

She goes on to point out the government outsources the target selection to informants — ones who have their own interests to serve and protect. This makes it clear the ATF is searching for dangerous criminals to talk into fake stash house robberies. It’s more than willing to take whoever — which more often than not is a minority with no history of violent crime or armed robbery. From there, the government gets to decide how many years of a suspect’s life it’s willing to try to take away. Invariably, every fake drug stash is large enough to demand 20-year minimum sentences.

Then she gets right to the heart of the matter: of course the ATF’s sting operations are racially-biased. They’re based on a bunch of lies, which gives the ATF the opportunity to pick anyone as its fall guy. But the agency always seems to end up arresting the same sort of people.

Law enforcement agents, on the other hand, do not deal with a closed universe of criminal suspects. When conducting a reverse sting, literally anyone could be a target. See Black, 733 F.3d at 315 (Noonan, J., dissenting) (“In the population of this country, there is an indefinite number of persons who dream of clever and unlawful schemes to make money. Does their dreamy amorality cast them all as fit candidates for a sting by their government?”). There is no reason to suspect that persons of a particular race are more likely to agree to commit a stash house robbery unless one believes that persons of that race are inherently more prone to committing violent crime for profit—a dangerously racist view that has no place in the law. If law enforcement agents target potential stash house robbers in a race-neutral way, then the racial breakdown of targeted individuals would presumably closely mirror that in the community. If it doesn’t, then that’s potentially indicative that the agents or their informants are using discriminatory procedures.

This is what the ATF does dozens of times a year. It takes fake drugs and fake stash houses and turns them into real prison sentences. And, so far, it’s been getting away with it. But it sounds like courts are beginning to tire of locking people up for unwittingly engaging in the ATF’s charades. At some point, this will all come crashing down on the feds, but until then dangerous criminals will continue to walk the streets while down-on-their-luck nobodies serve their prison terms for them.

Filed Under: atf, bias, daryle lamont sellers, entrapment, jacqueline nguyen, stash house, stings

Federal Judges Says ATF Stash House Stings Are Useless And Ugly

from the in-which-the-ATF-is-informed-its-baby-is-neither-cute-nor-likable dept

A chief federal judge in Chicago has handed down a scathing opinion calling ATF stash house stings an “ends justifies the means” evil that needs to be “relegated to the dark corridors of our past.” The opinion shuts the door on two defendants hoping to show the ATF’s fake robberies of fake stash houses filled with fake drugs were racially-biased, but it does show even without the taint of bias, the sting operations are exploitative and useless. (via Brad Heath)

The opinion [PDF] has nothing good to say about the stash house stings. It opens with numbers that certainly appear to show racial bias and it doesn’t let up from there.

It is undisputed that between 2006 and 2013, the defendants charged in this District in the ATF false stash house cases were 78.7 black, 9.6 percent Hispanic, and 11.7 percent white. During this same period, the District’s adult population was approximately 18 percent black, 11 percent Hispanic, and 63 percent White. These numbers generate great disrespect for law enforcement efforts. Disrespect for the law cannot be tolerated during these difficult times. It is time for false stash house cases to end and be relegated to the dark corridors of our past. To put it simply, our criminal justice system should not tolerate false stash house cases in 2018.

[…]

Our society simply cannot accept a “win at all costs” mentality in the delicate world of law enforcement, which is ultimately dependent on proactive citizen involvement.

The judge then goes on to speak about the valuable work of taking firearms off the streets, but says that this job cannot, and should not, be performed through bogus sting operations — even in an era where gun violence is seemingly more prevalent. Even when violence against citizens and (especially) law enforcement was at its peak nearly 100 years ago, the ATF never stooped to using complete bullshit to secure a steady stream of criminal defendants.

[E]ven during the low points of the great violence caused by the alcohol wars of Prohibition, the ATP did not seek to use “false alcohol warehouse” tactics against any ethnic organized crime groups to promote public safety. Instead, the ATP used solid investigative work to garner the great public respect of the Elliot Ness era that still lives today as the gold standard of law enforcement. This type of work inspires great public cooperation with law enforcement, unlike the false drug stash house cases before the Court.

Judge Ruben Castillo notes that many ATF sting cases — like the two before him — operate under the theory that roping in otherwise uninvolved citizens will somehow result in the seizure of illegal weapons. Some cases, obviously, do result in weapons being taken off the streets. Far more often, the only thing taken off the streets are people with little in the way of criminal records or cash, talked into taking down a fake stash house for a cut of a completely fabricated drugs and money. The fake amounts of drugs in the fake stash house are used to determine sentence lengths, with the ATF asserting — without exception — that the quantity of make-believe drugs discussed with sting victims is enough to trigger 20-year minimum sentences.

The judge points out that the government is lucky he’s only considering the issues raised by the defendants: alleged Fifth Amendment violations predicated on the apparent bias in the ATF’s stash house sting operations. Much of the 73-page opinion discussed expert opinions based on studies of the underlying facts of a decade’s-worth of stash house stings. Some evidence of discriminatory selection exists, but it’s undercut by most DEA stings being predicated on tips from confidential informants. In other words, maybe CI’s are bigoted, but the operations themselves are not, despite a large percentage of defendants being minorities.

The trials of these two defendants will continue. But the concerns expressed by the judge suggest the ATF is no longer welcome to bring stash house sting prosecutions into Judge Castillo’s court. This is only one judge of hundreds in the federal system, but it’s another federal judiciary voice to add to those who’ve already expressed concern, if not actual dismay, at the ATF’s sting operations.

Filed Under: atf, entrapment, stash house, stings

DC Cops Learn From FBI: Regularly Invent Crimes To Arrest 'Possible Future' Criminals

from the minority-report dept

As we recently discussed, it’s becoming readily apparent that the FBI’s most vaunted counter-terrorism wins are almost all stings for “crimes” they made up all by themselves and then coerced others to join. Even for those that don’t have a problem with this kind of practice in theory, it has to be jarring to learn just how many of these “terrorists” are either suffering serious mental or social illnesses or have had their confessions beaten out of them. By all appearances, it looks pretty clear that the FBI is bumping up their “win” statistics on the backs of these highly questionable stings.

So of course local law enforcement is getting in on the action as well. Take the police in Washington D.C., for instance, who are featured in a Washington Post story detailing how they invent armed robbery plans whole-cloth and then recruit civilians to join up shortly before arresting these future-criminals. Some of the plots the police of devised are quite detailed and terrifying, involving robbing liquor stores and targets that are supposedly drug dealers. After discussing the plans with an undercover cop, everyone is then arrested and charged with a variety of “conspiracy to commit” charges. According to some experts, the government is on firm legal ground with regards to entrapment.

The government is on solid legal ground, experts say, when it comes to fending off allegations that suspects were set up — or entrapped — by the police. Even if the government entices the defendant, the target has to show that he was not predisposed to commit the crime.

Sure, and if you’re a defendant in one of these cases, good luck convincing anyone that you didn’t have a predisposition for the crime you were tricked into thinking you were going to commit. Again, it’s easy to opine that these are bad people, but that doesn’t take into account mental illness and pressure applied by undercover officers eager to bolster their arrest statistics. According to reports, that kind of pressure included giving minors alcohol and/or taking them to strip clubs, because nobody has ever made themselves out to be something they’re not when drunk or in the presence of naked members of the opposite sex. The question becomes whether anything like the made up crime would have ever happened had it not been first invented by the police.

“When you have the government offering guns or the getaway car and making it really attractive, you have to ask: Is this an opportunity that would have really come around in real life? Would this person have been able to put together this type of crime without government assistance?” said Katharine Tinto, a professor at the Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law in New York who has studied undercover policing tactics.

It’s even worse when the police engineer aspects of the made up crimes in the sting in order to manufacture longer sentences for the would-be criminals they ensnare.

Tinto and others also take issue with the government’s ability to essentially engineer tough penalties by controlling the details of the made-up crime. Part of the reason the District cases have been so successful, according to defense lawyers, is that the potential jail time for the federal conspiracy charge is steep enough that many defendants are more inclined to make a deal with prosecutors than risk losing at trial.

The global problem in all of this is the aim: this is all about bolstering crime-fighting statistics rather than responding to any actual crimes or criminals. Will the police likely get some violent criminals off the streets with this tactic? Sure, but so could actual police work and, as I indicated, that isn’t what this is all about. On top of that, the questions raised by the tactic are serious and some of the people caught up in all this probably aren’t benefited most by engineered jail time. Add to all that questions about who the police are generally going to look towards as targets of this kind of sting operation (gasp, minorities), and we should be left wondering why they aren’t fighting the crime that exists rather than making up crime that otherwise wouldn’t.

Filed Under: criminals, entrapment, fbi, own plots, police, stings, washington dc

Maryland Police Dept. To Live Tweet Prostitution Vice Stings

from the you're-not-helping dept

Prostitution, they say, is the oldest of professions, which sort of has to be bullshit, because if selling sex was the first job ever, how could anyone ever pay for the sex? But I digress. Even if it isn’t the oldest profession, it certainly has a grand tradition of being used to whip up moral panics, such as when Congress freaked the hell out when they discovered, gasp, prostitutes can use Twitter! Who’d have thought? (Doesn’t syphilis make your thumbs fall off or something?) In any case, we’ve also recently seen that some police departments mistakenly believe that they too should be peddling themselves on social media, never mind how little they think through their campaigns.

But where prostitution and police using social media intersect results in the really terrible idea one Maryland department had to live-tweet/blog police prostitution stings. From the department’s own blog:

We won’t tell you when or where, other than it’s somewhere in the county sometime next week. The PGPD’s Vice Unit will conduct a prostitution sting that targets those soliciting prostitutes and we’ll tweet it out as it happens. From the ads to the arrests, we’ll show you how the PGPD is battling the oldest profession. Suspect photos and information will be tweeted. We’re using this progressive, and what we believe unprecedented, social media tactic to warn any potential participants that this type of criminal behavior is not welcome in Prince George’s County. You can follow @PGPDNews and search #PGPDVice as we take you along for the takedowns.

Prostitution is undoubtedly a complex subject, but one where many people feel that a hardline legal approach to it is inappropriate. In some places in this country, it isn’t even illegal. Where it still is illegal, many social workers will advocate a softer approach than shaming the hell out of everyone and throwing the book at hookers. That’s what we’ve been doing all this time, after all, and it hasn’t fixed a damned thing.

Also, police departments are not in the damned entertainment business. That last line on their post, about taking the public along “for the takedowns”? Screw them. Do your jobs, make things as safe as you possibly can, and leave the entertaining to the professionals. Posting names, never mind pictures, directly from the police of the accused is not fun, it isn’t entertaining, and it sure as hell ain’t justice. And I’m not the only one that thinks so.

But they then decided it was a good idea to live-tweet the sting as it was happening — which would include taking photos of suspects and posting them on Twitter — using the hashtag #PGPDVice. It’s mystifying that the police would think that live-tweeting a sting would get them any good publicity. After all, it was just last week that the New York Police Department saw its attempt at Twitter outreach go terribly, when they tried to start the hashtag #myNYPD to get pictures of people hanging out with the cops and instead got inundated with stories of people who had been targeted by stop-and-frisk and racial profiling.

If you must attack prostitutes and their johns, at least try to keep a bit of the dignity of your profession while you’re at it. You keep policing everyone, and I’ll handle the entertainment bit.

Filed Under: maryland, police, prince george county, prostitution, social media, stings