Chester Banks v. United States

Banks, not a lawyer, appeals propria persona from a denial of his motion in a 28 U.S.C. § 2255 proceeding without a hearing and the denial of his motion for the transcript of the reporter’s notes of the trial in which he was originally convicted. The court held the motions stated no cause of action.

Banks’ motion alleges his facts in the formal motion itself and in two affidavits all filed the same day. One concerns Banks’ entrapment by federal officers to purchase heroin with their money furnished him by them.

If these allegations be true they constitute an abuse of the court’s criminal processes to procure a conviction of a man, who for at least five years had not been concerned with the illicit drug trade, who had no idea of purchasing any drug until urged by a federal government agent who supplied Banks with $70.00 to purchase it to relieve the suffering of a friend of the agent in all of which the agent used a group of persons working in common with the government to persuade Banks to engage in buying the drug with the $70.00 at no profit to Banks.

Nowhere are these facts contradicted and we are required to accept them as true.

As the Supreme Court has stated of the…