Snared from p 18 people. Sometimes we use the word when we’re watching a football game, and there’s 40 seconds left, and we want our team to hustle to the end zone to make a play. “This case, though, is about a different type of hustle. The defendant, Trent Bouhdida, his hustle was selling drugs.” It was almost Thanksgiving, 2017. Bouhdida’s son was nearly two years old. He was born just a month before his father was arrested on four counts of selling marijuana. Bouhdida had spent the previous year and a half fighting the case, being “ping-ponged,” as he put it, between different attorneys: a pro-bono lawyer, a private law firm, a public defender. By the time of the trial, Bouhdida’s attorney was court-appointed. It was a man named Rodrick Carter, a longtime criminal defense attorney in Phoenix. Carter, at the time, was perhaps most well- known as co-counsel for Mark Goudeau, the convicted Baseline Killer. Less than two years after he represented Bouhdida, Carter’s license was suspended by the state bar for misconduct involving client trust accounts, and it remains suspended. He did not reply to interview requests from New Times for this story. That November, Carter and his new client had a fraying relationship. Bouhdida had grown distrustful of the attorneys who worked on his case. Plea negotiations had stalled when Bouhdida decided he couldn’t gamble on six and a half to 10 wary of testifying, because if he did, his prior armed robbery charge would be revealed to the jury. He chose not to take the stand. Regardless, entrapment defenses are notoriously difficult to prove, particularly in Arizona. “It almost never happens,” said Katie Gipson-McLean, a longtime public defender in Maricopa County. “That’s just, like, no-man’s land.” As the trial progressed, Cuevas built a portrait of Bouhdida out of the texts, the audio recordings, and testimony from Elcock, who took the stand for multiple days. Discussions of amounts and strains of cannabis became, in Cuevas’ telling, “lingo that only someone in this hustle, this game, this drug deal would know.” The 7-Eleven parking lot — across the street from Bouhdida’s apartment — became “an area known to [law enforcement] as an area where you could buy drugs.” “Like I was El Chapo or something,” Trent Bouhdida years in prison, the amount of time he was offered for a guilty plea. He attempted to represent himself for a time, which went poorly. A judge ultimately barred him from doing so. “I had so much going through my mind at that time,” Bouhdida said. His grand- mother had just died. His relationship with his girlfriend was strained by the court case. “It was already wild that I was facing that much time for this type of charge,” he Bouhdida with his son, now seven years old, who is growing up without his father. said. “It made it that much more difficult.” At trial, Bouhdida faced a Catch-22. The only real defense left to him was entrap- ment. The defense argued that it had been Elcock, not Bouhdida, who had conceived of the crime and induced him to commit it. But such a defense would rest on Bouhdida’s testimony, and Bouhdida was Bouhdida recalled. Carter attempted to push back. He pressed Elcock on how the subject of mari- juana had come up. He played clips to the jury of Bouhdida asking Elcock about his business, about job opportunities at the pawn shop. “The idea for committing this offense started with law enforcement,” Carter said, at the trial’s opening and close. But without Bouhdida’s testimony, the defense fell apart. There was no one else to vouch for his side of the story, to prove, as an entrapment defense requires, that he would not have sold the pot were it >> p 23 20 AUG 4TH–AUG 10TH, 2022 PHOENIX NEW TIMES | MUSIC | CAFE | FILM | CULTURE | NIGHT+DAY | FEATURE | NEWS | OPINION | FEEDBACK | CONTENTS | phoenixnewtimes.com
