I've never heard of this kind of proceeding even happening.

I wonder if there's a logical explanation for the makeup of their targets????

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=3828963&forum_id=2#34918882)

By dangling the promise of a big score, the U.S. Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives convinced hundreds of would-be robbers across the country that they were stealing large quantities of narcotics, only to find out the drugs were a figment of the government’s imagination.

But the strategy also has been controversial, sweeping up mostly African-American targets — some with only minor criminal backgrounds — and sparking allegations across the country of entrapment and racial profiling. With the way mandatory federal sentencing laws work, the stings have landed many defendants behind bars for decades or even life, even though the drugs never existed.

Now the legal battle is coming to a head in an unprecedented hearing at the Dirksen U.S. Courthouse in Chicago before a panel of nine district judges overseeing a dozen separate cases involving more than 40 defendants.

The hearing, which has been four years in the making, will take place over two days in the courthouse’s large ceremonial courtroom. As many as 30 defendants, their relatives and individual attorneys are expected to attend, and an overflow courtroom has been set up to handle the anticipated crowd.

“In my 46 years of practicing law, I’ve never seen anything like this before,” attorney Richard Kling, who represents one of the defendants, told the Chicago Tribune this week.

The testimony will focus on dueling experts who reached starkly different conclusions about the racial breakdown of targets in the stash house cases.

A nationally renowned expert hired by the Federal Criminal Justice Clinic at the University of Chicago Law School — which is spearheading the effort to have the cases dismissed — concluded that disparity between minority and white defendants in the stings was so large that there was "a zero percent likelihood" it happened by chance.

An expert testifying for federal prosecutors, though, will contend that conclusion used an “absurdly overbroad” sample that was designed to show a racial disparity where none exists.

The Tribune first reported the experts’ findings in a front-page story in March that highlighted the case of Leslie Mayfield, who has been in jail awaiting a new trial since his conviction and 22-year sentence were overturned on appeal three years ago.

“I’m not nervous about this hearing,” Mayfield, 49, wrote in an email to the Tribune from the Metropolitan Correctional Center. “I’m excited. I’m tired of being in jail and I’m ready to get this over.”

The groundbreaking hearing is being closely watched in federal districts across the country. How it plays out could have ramifications far beyond the 43 Chicago defendants who are seeking to have their charges thrown out. The judges are expected to issue separate rulings at a later date, although some lawyers think there could be joint opinions issued by several judges if any are in agreement.

“It’s impossible to predict,” said University of California at Irvine law professor Katharine Tinto, a criminal law expert who has written extensively about the stash house stings. “This is very unusual in the criminal court because every individual defendant typically has a very unique case.”

Tinto said the central argument of racial profiling unites the cases in a sort of criminal class action — a legal tool used in civil lawsuits. Aside from the fates of the individuals who were charged, the outcome could also force some soul-searching on behalf of law enforcement, she said.

“It could have an impact on having law enforcement agencies think critically about how they target suspects and how they structure undercover stings,” Tinto said. “And that sort of critical self-examination is a good thing.”

A spokesmen for the U.S. attorney's office in Chicago declined to comment for this story, citing the ongoing litigation. An ATF spokeswoman was not available for comment Wednesday.

Prosecuting a ‘desperate’ target

Launched in Miami during the cocaine-war days of the early 1990s, stash house stings have been honed over the years and are run by experienced agents who use a tightly controlled playbook.

They typically begin when an informant provides information to the ATF about a potential target who has expressed interest in taking part in a robbery. The informant then introduces the target to an undercover agent who poses as a disgruntled courier for a drug cartel and offers an opportunity to steal large quantities of drugs from a stash house guarded by men with guns.

In a series of conversations captured in undercover recordings, the target is told if he is interested he must assemble an armed team to commit the robbery. The target and his crew are arrested after they show up on the day of the supposed crime.

In order to avoid a defendant raising an entrapment defense, the stings are supposed to target only suspects who are already experienced robbers. ATF criteria also require that at least two of the participants have violent backgrounds and that all must be criminally active at the time the investigation is launched.

The issue of racial profiling started to simmer four years ago after U.S. District Chief Judge Ruben Castillo ordered prosecutors to turn over to defense attorneys in a stash house case detailed information on how the stings are run and the race of the defendants who had been charged so far.

After the University of Chicago team got involved, another ruling in July 2015 by the appellate court in Chicago resulted in the government turning over more data on the stings.

The data showed that the vast majority of those swept up in the stings were minorities, according to defense lawyers. A close examination of the criminal backgrounds of some of those targeted also raised questions about whether they were truly the most dangerous gun offenders ATF was aiming to remove from the street, they said.

Some had trouble even coming up with guns to do the job — including one crew that after months of preparation managed to find only one World War I-era pistol with a broken handle that could barely fire a round, court records show. Others had no history of carrying out high-risk armed robberies — a key provision in the ATF playbook designed to make sure targets were legitimate, defense lawyers have argued.

Mayfield, for one, talked on undercover recordings about his experience robbing stash houses, but in reality he had no arrests for robbing drug dealers. The fact that he was lured into the sting while working a full-time job and apparently trying to better his life has also been heavily criticized by the appellate court.

Another case prosecuted in Chicago involved Tracy Conley, who was ensnared after two acquaintances approached him with a plan to rob a stash house supposedly filled with 50 kilos of cocaine. At the time, Conley was working a full-time job but was struggling to make ends meet. In fact, he was stuck at a gas station with no money for fuel to get home on the day he was approached, court records show.

Conley was convicted by a jury and faced a mandatory minimum 15-year sentence. At his sentencing hearing, U.S. District Judge Sharon Johnson Coleman expressed disgust with the government’s conduct, saying that putting Conley in prison for such a long stretch was not only unfair but it also served “no real purpose other than to destroy any vestiges of respect in our legal system and law enforcement that (Conley) and his community may have had.”

Last month, the 7th Circuit upheld Conley’s 15-year sentence but echoed Coleman’s statements, questioning the wisdom of expending so many resources to prosecute an “unsophisticated and desperate” target.

Because Conley lost his appeal, he is not among the 43 defendants whose cases will be heard Thursday. But Coleman, the judge who came down hard on the government for his prosecution, will be on the panel.

‘Overwhelmingly men of color’

The hearing will focus almost entirely on the likely dry testimony of two experts who analyzed the same data.

For the University of Chicago team, Jeffrey Fagan, a nationally known specialist in police practices who also examined the New York Police Department's stop-and-frisk policy, examined 94 defendants in 24 separate stings conducted between 2006 and 2013 and found that 74 of the defendants were black.

When he compared those numbers to general population statistics, Fagan concluded that minorities were "substantially more likely" than similarly situated whites to be targeted by ATF in the stash house stings, court filings show.

"Each test showed the same pattern: Being black significantly increased a person's chance of being targeted by the ATF," lawyers for the defendants wrote in their motion to dismiss the cases.

But the expert hired by the U.S. attorney's office, Northwestern University law professor Max Schanzenbach, concluded that Fagan had used an "absurdly overbroad" group to compare to stash house defendants, including people with only minor criminal convictions such as simple drug possession and misdemeanor assault, a court filing by prosecutors show.

In all, Fagan's "eligible list" included nearly 300,000 people — a number that equals 10 percent of all males ages 14-49 in the Chicago area, their filing said. Using such a broad swath of the public in a statistical analysis ignores the realities of how the stash house stings work, prosecutors have said.

"ATF agents do not compile a list of citizens with criminal records throughout the district, select people from the list at random, and then cold-call those people and offer them a chance to rob a stash house," prosecutors wrote. "There is no reason the home invasion defendants should resemble Professor Fagan's fantasy home invasion lottery."

Tinto, the University of California law professor, said the key question for the judges will come down to whether there is any logical explanation that so many of the stash house targets were black.

“This is a debate among experts about the fact that the defendants in these cases are overwhelmingly men of color,” Tinto said. “How did that come to be? Is that because of their criminal histories? Is it chance? Or is it because of racially biased policing?”

The discrimination does not have to be explicitly stated as a purpose of the stings, according to previous court rulings. It can be inferred from all the evidence, including expert testimony that there’s no explanation other than race for why so many targets were black men.

Whatever the outcome, the hearing could put prosecutors in an interesting position, defending their own law enforcement agencies from allegations of racism even as the federal government has slapped city after city — Chicago included — with troubling civil rights findings on policing.

Mayfield, for one, said it’s a complex problem, and he doesn’t expect it to change anytime soon.

“There is no one thing that will solve the issue of treating everyone equally,” he said.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=3828963&forum_id=2#34919077)

so uh

what do YOU think that means, uchicago

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=3828963&forum_id=2#34921807)

fuck these snitches

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=3828963&forum_id=2#34922355)