Stacey Barchenger

USA TODAY NETWORK – Tennessee

A federal appeals court says a Nashville judge was right to overturn the 2012 convictions of three men in a widespread conspiracy case prosecutors said was connected to Somali gangs.

The 6th Circuit Court of Appeals went a step farther in its opinion released Wednesday, saying it doubted whether federal prosecutors had evidence to support the case at all. The judges say the case was based on a fictitious story and a person who had been diagnosed as insane.

Attorneys for the three men — Idris Fahra, Andrew Kayachith and Yassin Yusef — say the government should not have prosecuted the case and that the ruling could impact the cases of 16 other people who were charged. Officials had touted the case as a multi-state sex trafficking organization that operated for about a decade in several states, including Minnesota and Tennessee.

"My client has been living under the cloud of this for almost the past four years, and at this point he’s been acquitted of all the charges. I’m very happy for him," said John Nicoll, who represented Kayachith and last year was appointed Coffee County public defender by Gov. Bill Haslam.

"I never felt like this was sex trafficking ring. I felt like this was a juvenile delinquency case that got changed into something it wasn’t."

The 6th Circuit Court of Appeals appears to agree, and laments having to weigh in on a case with questionable evidence.

"We conclude from our careful review of the trial transcript and record that, if the prosecution proved any sex trafficking at all (and we have serious doubts that it did), then at best it proved two separate, unrelated, and dissimilar sex-trafficking conspiracies, involving different defendants, albeit with the same alleged victim, namely Jane Doe 2," the appeals opinion, from judges Alice M. Batchelder, Sean F. Cox and Helene N. White, reads.

MORE: Read the opinion from the 6th Circuit Court of Appeals.

David Boling, a spokesman for the U.S. Attorney's Office for the Middle District of Tennessee, said his office would review the decision of the 6th Circuit and assess how it would impact the prosecution of the remaining 16 defendants.

The case and appeal

The appeals court affirmed U.S. District Judge William Haynes' December 2012 ruling overturning the convictions of Fahra, Kayachith and Yusef, and agreed with Haynes' reasoning that the government did not prove the men were part of a single, overarching conspiracy.

The government had appealed Haynes' ruling.

Thirty people, most of whom were Somali immigrants or refugees and male students ages 17 to 21, were originally indicted in 2010.

Government prosecutors claimed they were members of a Somali gang that ran a prostitution ring involving underage girls. Nine stood trial in April 2012 and after three weeks of testimony and five days of deliberations, six were acquitted by the jury. Fahra, Kayachith and Yusef were convicted on a charge of conspiracy to commit sex trafficking of children.

Haynes cited issues with the evidence in the case as did the 6th Circuit Court of Appeals. Among those issues, as outlined in the court's 24-page opinion:

St. Paul, Minn., police officer and FBI sex-trafficking task force member Heather Weyker met in secret with a girl, who the government said was the victim and is named in documents as Jane Doe 2, even after the girl's parents objected.

The girl was a habitual runaway who had history with police and had been in juvenile detention before. After 30 interviews, Weyker "produced a story in which Jane Doe 2 was not a troubled runaway or a juvenile delinquent, but was instead an innocent child taken in by a Somali gang who used her for sex, either as a prostitute or for free sex with gang members."

"Jane Doe 2 had a choice," said David Komisar, a Nashville attorney who represented Yusef. "She could be a juvenile delinquent, runaway, party girl, which would have devastated her family, who was a very conservative Muslim family.

“She’s faced with that, or she could be a victim. She chose to be a victim.”

The district and appeals courts found that Weyker lied several times in the course of the investigation.

Weyker was put on paid administrative leave on Thursday, according to Steve Linders, a spokesman for the St. Paul, Minn., police department. Linders said the appeals court's opinion raised serious concerns about Weyker's actions and that an internal affairs investigation was under way.

The appeals court also said Jane Doe 2 and Jane Doe 5, another girl the government said was a victim, repeatedly contradicted their own testimony.

Jane Doe 2 testified that she was brought to Nashville for sex-trafficking, according to the court records, but also said she was never forced or threatened to have sex. The appeals court says Jane Doe 5 was not believable, had never met Jane Doe 2, and had been diagnosed as insane and was off her medication during trial.

"Before continuing, we acknowledge that we are proceeding, as we must, on the story the prosecution presented at trial, despite our acute concern, based on our painstaking review of the record, that this story of sex trafficking and prostitution may be fictitious and the prosecution's two primary witnesses, Jane Doe 2 and Jane Doe 5, unworthy of belief," the 6th Circuit's opinion reads.

The opinion also says that Jane Doe 2's family concocted a story to make their immigration to the United States easier, including saying Jane Doe 2 was 15 when she was likely four years older than that. Komisar said the family emigrated from Kenya.

"These guys, their lives were destroyed," said Nashville attorney Jennifer Thompson, who represented Fahra. "It’s disturbing that time and again, when it was clear this woman was lying, the government just turned a blind eye. Her family was committing immigration fraud.

The case "has a lot of the same kind of 'Making a Murderer' type features," she continued, comparing the case to a popular Netflix show series. "Where there’s evidence, the police seemed to have overlooked a lot of facts, and their handwritten notes did not end up matching the typed reports."

What's next

Komisar called the appeals court opinion a rebuke to the government and said his client, Yusef, will be released from custody. The other two men, Fahra and Kayachith, had previously been released on conditions such as GPS monitoring and under curfews.

"He’ll stand a little more than 53 months in jail for nothing, for a lie of Jane Doe 2 and her family and the government allowed it to happen," Komisar said.

"It just was an overreach. Minnesota, when they looked at it, they said we don’t want any part of it. The U.S. Attorney’s Office here in Nashville got hoodwinked by Heather Weyker and Jane Doe 2."

The Associated Press contributed to this report.

Reach Stacey Barchenger at 615-726-8968 or on Twitter @sbarchenger.