24 THENEWYORKER,OCTOBER18, 2021
motion on White’s behalf. The motion
included a letter from Mayfield. “It was
me who lured Dwayne into this case,”
he wrote. “I was standing right next to
him when two weeks after our arrest
he was told that he had a child on the
way.... It’s not too late for her to have
her father.” On August 9th, White re-
ceived word that he would be going
home. He arrived the next day at O’Hare
Airport to find his eleven-year-old
daughter waiting for him.
I
n prison, Boyer circulated the Chi-
cago group’s filings among stash-
house targets, so that they could use
the arguments in their own cases.
Around the same time, in 2015, Boyer
heard that the Obama Administration
was starting a clemency initiative aimed
primarily at nonviolent offenders who
had served at least ten years of their
sentences. He and his lawyer, Katie
Tinto, the director of the Criminal Jus-
tice Clinic at the University of Cali-
fornia, Irvine, School of Law, put to-
gether a hundred-and-sixty-five-page
petition with facts about his case along-
side testimony from family, friends, and
the judge who oversaw his sentencing.
“Since I’ve been incarcerated, I’ve lost
my mother, grandmother, grandfather,
aunt, and several cousins,” Boyer wrote.
“I have paid for my mistakes.” Ten
months later, he was summoned to the
warden’s office for a legal call. Tinto
was sobbing. “You got it,” she said. “You
got it.” Boyer was released in 2017, after
sixteen years behind bars.
In late May of this year, I went to
visit Boyer in St. Petersburg, Florida,
where he was living with his girlfriend
and her two daughters in a tiny mint-
green bungalow with white trim. The
house was framed by sugarberries and
maples, and the girls’ purple bicycles lay
on the ground outside. Boyer greeted
me in a T-shirt, shorts, and a baseball
cap; he is small, with close-set blue eyes
and a jumpy, boyish energy. Something
about the way prison warps the passage
of time had given him an aura of sus-
pended youth, as though signs of age—
his crow’s-feet, the graying parts of his
goatee—had been painted on a much
younger person.
Since his release, Boyer has been
working as a freelance paralegal and
campaigning to persuade the Depart-
ment of Justice to ban stash-house stings.
He has sent letters to members of Con-
gress, the D.O.J.’s inspector general, and
the House Committee on Oversight
and Reform, and he wants to help Tinto
and Zunkel, who are compiling clem-
ency petitions on behalf of a large group
of stash-house targets who remain in
prison. Until recently, Boyer was encour-
aged by President Biden’s nominee for
head of the A.T.F., David Chipman, a
reform-minded former agent. In Sep-
tember, however, after a campaign by
the N.R.A. and other pro-gun groups,
Biden withdrew the nomination. Now
Boyer is hoping that Representative
Bobby Scott, a Democrat from Virginia,
will reintroduce his Safe Justice Act,
which, among other provisions, would
give judges the discretion to bypass man-
datory minimums in certain cases. “One
of the enticements of these prosecutions
is the fact that you can get a nice reward
of a huge sentence at the end,” Scott
told me. If you remove that enticement,
he said, “that ruins the media attractive-
ness of the spectacle.”
Boyer and I decided to try to find
the storage facility where he had been
arrested. He hadn’t been back since the
day of the sting, twenty years earlier,
but he was sure that he’d recognize it.
We drove across the silvery expanse of
the bay into Tampa, pelicans flying low
over the cars. Boyer told me that he
understood why some people might
not be sympathetic to men who said
they were willing to commit armed
robbery, and he took responsibility for
showing up to the storage facility that
day. For that reason, he felt that the
degree of government involvement
should be considered at sentencing.
The greater law enforcement’s role, the
lighter the sentence. Such a system
would recognize that guilt comes in
shades of gray. Until then, he feared,
police would be free to invent new plots
to lure people into crime. “If you’ve got
the power and the ability to tempt peo-
ple, then you get to define who’s a crim-
inal and who’s not,” Boyer said. “It’s
kind of like playing God.”
Stash-house stings and other under-
cover operations are premised on the
idea that there are people who break
the law and there are people who don’t.
But in reality most of us are what legal
scholars call probabilistic offenders, peo-
ple who might break the law under cer-
tain circumstances. “Somebody who’s
broke or has been broke, somebody who’s
suffering or has been suffering, proba-
bly is at a lot more risk than people who
haven’t been in that situation before,”
Boyer said. “Everybody has a price.” In
the early eighties, Gary T. Marx, the
sociologist, gave Congress a similar
warning. “Some of the new police un-
dercover work has lost sight of the pro-
found difference between carrying out
an investigation to determine if a sus-
pect is in fact breaking the law and car-
rying it out to determine if an individ-
ual can be induced to break the law,”
he said. “As with God testing Job, the
question ‘Is he corrupt?’ was replaced
with the question ‘Is he corruptible?’”
Boyer merged onto a highway lined
with nail salons, coin laundromats, fast-
food restaurants, and billboards for per-
sonal-injury lawyers. “Nobody’s had to
admit any wrongdoing or fault in the
process,” he said. Zayas is now a senior
special agent; he has never spoken pub-
licly about his role in creating the stash-
house sting, and he did not respond to
my requests for an interview. After the
Chicago class action, the A.T.F. ap-
peared to stop running stash-house
stings in the Northern District of Illi-
nois, but the operations have been de-
ployed elsewhere in the country as re-
cently as 2019. The A.T.F. declined to
disclose whether it continues to use
these stings today. A spokesperson told
me, “Per policy, we cannot discuss trade-
craft or investigative techniques.”
“This is it,” Boyer said, as we turned
into the parking lot of a storage facility
with a gabled roof over the entrance. “It
looks the same.” We walked back into
the rows of units, rounding a corner to
see a sign that said “Smile, you’re on
camera.” Boyer showed me where the
snipers had appeared on the roof, and
the spot where he had lain on the ground,
holding his head in his hands, waiting
for the ringing in his ears to stop. He
told me that he had thought about this
place nearly every day while he was in
prison, and that he was unnerved by the
hold it still had on him. He started to
feel weak and light-headed, so I sug-
gested we go back to the car. “I thought
that I had been able to take the rock off
my back and set it down,” he said. “But
your body remembers.”
