Because it gets prosecutors easy “wins”, cops easy arrests, and gets tons of funding for agencies that otherwise wouldn’t be that big a deal in the scheme of things.
Expect a lot more garbage like this in the future. Crime rates have dropped like a rock in America for decades now, and career cops in many areas are struggling to find enough crimes to justify their jobs.
same shit humans…!!
Ach, for the old days when entrapment was one of the worst things the government did that we knew of.
Now e know of so much more, past and present, starting with the lies upon which America was founded. (Not to take anything away from this story.)
Probably quite a long time ago.
“setting himself apart from the abusive men she’d loved before.”
Yeah, turns out - not really.
Agreed!
As I understand it US law doesn’t strictly speaking require coercion. I’ll be the first to admit my knowledge of US law is virtually non-existent but assuming this is a reasonable source:
https://www.justice.gov/usam/criminal-resource-manual-645-entrapment-elements
It really does seem to be a lovely catch 22.
If the government ‘induces’ you to commit the offence, that is badwrong unless you had a ‘predisposition’ to commit the offence.
Asking you to commit the offence is not ‘inducement’. Tricking you into committing the offence is not ‘inducement’.
OTOH, a showing of at least persuasion or mild coercion, United States v. Nations, 764 F.2d 1073, 1080 (5th Cir. 1985); pleas based on need, sympathy, or friendship, ibid.; or extraordinary promises of the sort “that would blind the ordinary person to his legal duties,” United States v. Evans, 924 F.2d 714, 717 (7th Cir. 1991) will count.
Except that: See also United States v. Kelly, 748 F.2d 691, 698 (D.C. Cir. 1984) (inducement shown only if government’s behavior was such that “a law-abiding citizen’s will to obey the law could have been overborne”);
And none of that matters if you have a ‘pre-disposition’ to commit the offence, which I can’t help but read as “if you’re a member of the criminal underclass”, especially given:
Also, predisposition may exist even in the absence of prior criminal involvement: “the ready commission of the criminal act,” such as where a defendant promptly accepts an undercover agent’s offer of an opportunity to buy or sell drugs, may itself establish predisposition. Jacobson, 503 U.S. at 550.
You committed the crime, therefore clearly you were predisposed to commit the crime!
Oh and if you claim ‘entrapment’, you allow the prosecutors to bring in all sorts of bad character evidence (which they would normally not be allowed to present) since it goes to show predisposition.
It’s a great catch, that Catch-22.
I particularly want to track the case report of Jacobson down:
Although entrapment is generally a jury question, Mathews, 485 U.S. at 63, the Court found entrapment as a matter of law in Jacobson, 503 U.S. at 550, where the defendant ordered child pornography after “he had already been the target of 26 months of repeated mailings and communications from Government agents and fictitious organizations.”
So the government was mailing some poor sod invitations to buy child porn for 26 months? How is that possibly a good use of government time and resources?
Found it:
http://caselaw.findlaw.com/us-supreme-court/503/540.html
It’s as bad as you’d think it is.
It’s not covered by the Constitution so the specifics of entrapment can vary by jurisdiction.
This really speaks to the insidiousness of this kind of “broken windows” law enforcement and sting operations against normal citizens. You may look “tough on crime” and you’re making lots of arrests and citations but are you really making a difference? But I guess it’s easier to feel good about taking down large numbers of street-level sex workers and drug dealers, addicts, Johns, troubled youth, and so on versus working toward solving root causes. Good law enforcement is about prevention, not punishment in my opinion.
This topic was automatically closed after 5 days. New replies are no longer allowed.
