Could this jeopardize the case against Somali sex traffickers?

While I’m on the subject of Somalis this morning, see earlier post here, this is a story coming out of Tennessee about the case against the nearly 30 Somalis arrested for sex-trafficking of a minor and other offenses first reported here in November of last year.

It’s long and quite a legal tangle, so you will need to read the whole story.  The first thing I thought of was:  I sure hope this doesn’t cause the case to be thrown out of court!

From The City Paper:

What do you get when you put some 30 lawyers in a room together and ask them to agree on something? Those masochistic enough to attend an upcoming federal court hearing could find out, but the punch line won’t be as funny as the setup might promise.

Two weeks ago, District Judge William J. Haynes set an April 26 hearing date to hash out several concerns surrounding a bundle of inmates’ recorded phone calls from jail, including attorney-client conversations, which some believe are privileged despite warnings by detention facilities that they’re being recorded.

What’s more, some of the recorded calls are between attorneys and clients who aren’t even involved in the case at hand.

The issue arose after federal prosecutors distributed the government’s discovery to the defendants in U.S.A. v. Adan et al, the case in which a federal indictment charged 29 individuals (two have since been dropped from the case because they aren’t yet in custody), many of whom are Somali and alleged by the government to be members or associates of Somali gangs.

Defendants in the case face charges of sex-trafficking juvenile girls, perjury, auto theft and credit card fraud. A large part of the government’s voluminous discovery for the case is contained on 142 discs of recorded inmate phone calls from a Davidson County jail and other detention facilities housing the federal inmates in the Adan case.

But one attorney determined that some of the calls on the discs turned over by the government to all of the defense attorneys in the case were unrelated. That sparked a debate over when attorney-client calls are privileged and what the attorneys should do with the discs to which currently, based on an stay by Haynes, they aren’t supposed to be listening.

What a mess!  Read on.

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