United States v. Mayfield

• Decision Date: 13 November 2014
• Docket Number: No. 11–2439.,11–2439.
• Citation: 771 F.3d 417
• Parties: UNITED STATES of America, Plaintiff–Appellee, v. Leslie C. MAYFIELD, Defendant–Appellant.
• Court: U.S. Court of Appeals — Seventh Circuit

771 F.3d 417

UNITED STATES of America, Plaintiff–Appellee,

v.Leslie C. MAYFIELD, Defendant–Appellant.

No. 11–2439.

United States Court of Appeals, Seventh Circuit.

Argued April 16, 2013.

Decided Nov. 13, 2014.

Mark E. Schneider, Attorney, Office of the United States Attorney, Chicago, IL, for Plaintiff–Appellee.

Fitzgerald T. Bramwell, Attorney, Law Offices of Fitzgerald Bramwell, Chicago, IL, for Defendant–Appellant.

Before WOOD, Chief Judge, and BAUER, POSNER, EASTERBROOK, KANNE, ROVNER, WILLIAMS, SYKES, TINDER, and HAMILTON, Circuit Judges.^*

SYKES, Circuit Judge.

Leslie Mayfield was indicted for conspiring with a coworker and a drug courier to rob a stash house controlled by the courier's suppliers. The conspiracy was a setup; the drug courier was an undercover government agent and the coworker was an informant. At his trial Mayfield wanted to present a defense of entrapment, but the government opposed it and moved in limine to preclude the defense, arguing that there wasn't enough evidence to show that the government induced the crime or that Mayfield lacked the predisposition to commit it. Mayfield responded with a narrative of the informant's persistent campaign to secure his participation in the stash-house robbery and his repeated resistance to the scheme. The district court granted the government's motion and barred the defense. The jury, uninstructed on the entrapment issue, convicted Mayfield of several federal crimes stemming from the conspiracy.

A divided panel of this court affirmed, see United States v. Kindle, 698 F.3d 401 (7th Cir.2012), and a petition for rehearing en banc followed. Recognizing some confusion in our entrapment jurisprudence, we granted rehearing en banc to clarify the doctrine both substantively and procedurally.

Entrapment is a defense to criminal liability when the defendant was not predisposed to commit the charged crime before the intervention of the government's agents and the government's conduct induced him to commit it. The two elements of the defense—lack of predisposition and government inducement—are conceptually related but formally and temporally distinct. We define the two elements here and resolve some conflicting strains in our caselaw about the relationship between them.

Procedurally, the entrapment defense is an issue of fact for the jury. The defendant is entitled to an entrapment jury instruction if he can show that some evidence supports both elements of the defense. When the issue is raised before trial on the government's motion to preclude the defense, the court must accept the defendant's factual proffer as true and not weigh the evidence against the government's counterstatement of the facts.

Here, Mayfield proffered enough evidence to justify giving the issue to the jury. He provided some facts showing that he was not predisposed to commit the charged crimes prior to being approached by the informant, and he narrated a story of substantial government inducement going beyond the mere offer of a chance to rob a stash house. His story may be false or unpersuasive, but that's for the jury to decide. The district court erred by crediting the government's evidence over Mayfield's and precluding the entrapment defense before trial. We vacate the judgment and remand for a new trial.

I. Background

We take the facts from Mayfield's pretrial proffer (most of which was excluded pretrial) and the evidence introduced at trial. Mayfield was convicted of residential burglary in 1987 at age 18 and served time in jail for this crime. In 1994 he was convicted of several violent crimes stemming from an armed carjacking; he received a lengthy prison sentence. While in prison he earned a GED, an associate degree in general studies, and vocational certificates in commercial custodial services and cosmetology. He was released in 2005 and returned home to Waukegan, Illinois, where he participated in the Second Chance Program operated by the Urban League of Lake County, the Waukegan Township Coalition to Reduce Recidivism, and Cease Fire Waukegan.

But not all was well. At some point after his release from prison (we don't know exactly when), Mayfield was charged with unlawful possession of a firearm. That prosecution was still pending when the events in this case took place. In 2008 he moved with his fiancée from Waukegan to Naperville, ostensibly to escape gang violence.

Although jobs for convicted felons were hard to come by, Mayfield managed to find sporadic work. After moving to Naperville, he found a temporary job in nearby Bolingbrook that allowed him to work a 40–hour workweek. He started this new job in late April or early May of 2009 and soon thereafter met Jeffrey Potts, a coworker with whom he had much in common. Potts was also a felon with convictions for drug trafficking, robbery, and gun possession. The two men commiserated about their financial straits, their difficulty finding permanent jobs, and their struggle to support their families. What Mayfield did not know was that his new friend was supplementing his income as a confidential informant for the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives (“ATF”). ¹

As an informant Potts was supposed to identify targets for sting operations and, as in this case, participate in the stings. He selected Mayfield as a target because he knew that Mayfield had a criminal record.² What followed, according to Mayfield, was a concerted effort to entrap him into committing a stash-house robbery.

In his first overture to Mayfield, Potts explained that he had returned to selling cocaine and invited Mayfield to join him in the drug trade. Mayfield rebuffed this offer. A few days later Potts learned that Mayfield had a pending gun-possession charge, so he tried another tack. He told Mayfield of a one-time opportunity “that was worth a lot of money.” His drug supplier was planning to “stickup” his wholesaler, a robbery that would net tens of thousands of dollars in cocaine. Potts invited Mayfield to participate in the robbery in return for a share of the profits. Mayfield rejected the invitation.

Potts persisted. Each day at work he tried to persuade Mayfield to join the conspiracy by appealing to his concerns about money. He urged Mayfield to think about the financial needs of his family, saying “I know you [are] tired of working for this chump change” and “I know you need this money,” among other similar lines of persuasion. Potts also flaunted his expensive Dodge Ram pickup truck, telling Mayfield that he bought it with $40,000 he had “earned” in another drug robbery. Mayfield continued to decline the offers.

On June 25, 2009, Mayfield's car was damaged in an accident. He borrowed money from a family member to have the car towed but did not have enough to pay for the needed repairs. He missed three days of work before he found another way to get to his job in Bolingbrook. When Potts asked him why he had missed work, Mayfield told him about the accident and explained his financial predicament. Potts unexpectedly gave him $180 in cash to pay for the car repairs.

Two days later Potts returned to the subject of the stashhouse robbery, again pressuring Mayfield to join the conspiracy. Mayfield equivocated but did not agree to anything. The following week Potts tried again. When Mayfield continued to resist, Potts gestured to a Gangster Disciples tattoo on Mayfield's arm. The tattoo dated from Mayfield's membership in the street gang before his carjacking conviction; he knew that failure to repay a debt risked harsh punishment from the gang. When Potts said he was still associated with the Gangster Disciples, Mayfield took it as a warning that he would be in danger if he did not quickly pay up. By the end of the day, Mayfield agreed to participate in the stash-house robbery conspiracy.

According to the standard ATF script for the sting, a fictional drug courier was disgruntled with his organization and wanted to rob one of its stash houses. Mayfield was to meet with the courier to discuss logistics, then recruit a crew, gather weapons, and help the courier carry out the robbery. Mayfield contends that because he was still reluctant to participate, Potts went off script and instead urged him to play along with the plan to rob the stash house but at the last minute rob the courier instead, which would be a less risky way to repay the debt—or at least not as dangerous as running into a guarded stash house.

Potts and Mayfield met with the “drug courier”—actually undercover Special Agent Dave Gomez—on July 23, 2009. Depending on whose version is believed, this meeting involved not one but two setups: Gomez and Potts were setting up Mayfield for prosecution; Mayfield and Potts were setting up Gomez for a robbery. Gomez told the pair that he normally received instructions to transport cocaine about once a month and that the shipments typically involved six to eight kilograms. He also said his organization typically kept 20 to 30 kilograms at its guarded stash houses, the locations of which were kept secret until just before the transport.

Recordings of this meeting indicate that Mayfield helped plan the robbery. He told Gomez that he had experience in knocking off stash houses but had not done a robbery quite like this one before. He said he felt like he was going in blind and suggested that the “element of surprise” would be essential. He assured Gomez that the people he was going to recruit were “for real” and agreed to gather the guns, bulletproof vests, and other equipment for the robbery. Mayfield claims it was all a bluff.

On July 27, 2009, Gomez and Mayfield spoke again by phone, and Mayfield reported that his recruits were ready to meet. Gomez and Mayfield kept in touch by phone for about two weeks, and the next meeting took place on August 9, 2009. Mayfield brought along Montreece Kindle, who in turn brought Nathan Ward and a person known only as “New York.” The group went over the strategy and logistics...