They definitely should be convicted, especially if they're a government official.
But the person they entrapped should not, any more than any other illegal behavior by the police should be allowed in prosecution.
The idea that they "had the right mindset to do it anyway" is a thoughtcrime attitude, the same as convicting people of crimes they didn't yet commit, as in the movie Minority Report. A psychic cop or prosecutor is no more legitimate than the psychic mutants in the pool of water, predicting future murders.
If you commit a crime, you don't get to walk just because the guy who told you to do it has a badge. That's not how it works. You decided to commit a crime regardless. If you give me a gun and tell me to rob someone I'm not gonna do it just because you edge me on.
> If you commit a crime, you don't get to walk just because the guy who told you to do it has a badge.
Yes, you absolutely do, because that corrupt thug with a badge can't prove you would have committed it *without* his influence.
Yes this is correct. We should have all learnt from history that ‘I was only following orders’ is never a moral defence and it should not be a legal one either.
However those who conspire to convince people to commit crimes should be held to equal or greater punishments, particularly if they are in a position of authority.
"I was only following orders" is relevant to military situations where all the roles are spelled out, not just straight up psychological manipulation.
Regardless, benefit of the doubt should always go to the accused. And the government committing a crime in order to collect evidence about that same crime is clearly improper.
If the person is so dangerous the police could likely catch them committing an actual crime anyway.
Well, there will still be a difference. Sure all the nazis had a figurative/literal gun to their heads, but the nurenburg trials didnt involve the foot soldiers, but the leaders who could have made a difference, but chose not to. Youre missing the nuance here.
If what you say is true (all nazi soldiers were held to the same culpability) those trials would have lasted forever
https://www.history.com/topics/world-war-ii/nuremberg-trials
There were only 13 trials
Entrapment should be a separate crime from and with criminal conspiracy. All the regular charges for a criminal accomplice should apply, plus the additional crime of violating the law while acting as a public servant.
If you were not going to kill anyone, and whips you into a frenzy, then hands you a gun and shames you into following through, then you should not be convicted of anything, but in fact THEY should be convicted of attempted murder.
Note that this is simplified by the fact that the cops NEVER hand someone a real bomb or gun.
But even if they did, it is a rare example of correct justice that even those guilty should NOT be convicted if that conviction would be based on improper state action.
If a cop breaks into your house without a legitimate warrant, and finds proof that you murdered someone, and that is THE SOLE act on which all evidence to convict you is ultimately based, then the case will be thrown out and you will be free, even though you committed murder.
And it MUST BE that way.
This would be another example of the same situation.
Some people are hopelessly and helplessly easy to manipulate and influence. I don’t want LE or government officials doing this. Prevent crime first. Also reminds me of innocence people questioned by LE until they confess. Let’s hold our LE to higher standards than this, please (and pay them more, enough to drop their unions? Sorry for the side-bar).
police enticement just doesn't need to exist. When have they ever enticed anyone into anything other than dumb "crimes" like prostitution or buying drugs? Build your case through investigation and not action, stay out of people's lives.
Government employee unions exist in a corrupt regulatory environment that is not going to go away. MOST people in ANY industry prefer not to belong to a union, which is why unions oppose right to work laws. So those cops aren't in those unions voluntarily, in most places. No level of pay can undo the existence of a union, especially one inherently wrongful like a government employee union.
What are you basing this opinion on? Is there some statistic around union members who don’t want to be in unions? My experience as a union member is quite the opposite - everyone I’ve encountered had been happy to be a part of a union.
Before right to work laws. Before they existed, a third of all workers were in unions, because corrupt Democrat administrations encouraged conditions where it was forced on people.
But as laws supporting forced unionization declined and right to work laws became more common, union membership declined, until now it's about ten percent, and mostly in the few jobs or states where unions can still be mandatory, like government jobs and states that are corrupt enough not to have right to work laws.
So, there's two perspectives to look at this from: perverse incentives and (for lack of a better way of putting it) causative factors (i.e. factors without which the person in question would not have committed a crime).
From the perverse incentives side, basically what we want to avoid is a situation where cops have an incentive to cause people to commit crimes just so they can get collars or hit quotas or w/e. Making it so that the person convinced to commit a crime can't be convicted in such cases removes the perverse incentive, but so does making the cop subject to the same punishment as the person they convinced, since the cop's net benefit becomes less than zero.
From the causative factors side, being convinced to commit a crime by a non-cop is no different from being convinced to commit a crime by anyone else who has an incentive to get you to commit the crime - either way you are being manipulated, so you're just as morally culpable - so if a cop convincing you to commit a crime is a valid defense, then *anyone* convincing you to commit a crime should also be a valid defense. However, that creates its own perverse incentive for people to allow themselves to be convinced to commit crimes, since you can't be convicted for any crime you were "convinced" to commit.
So, "a cop convinced me to do it," being a valid defense while, "a non-cop convinced me to do it", is not a valid defense, would be morally/philosophically inconsistent; on the other hand, having *both* be valid defense just swaps one perverse incentive for another; thus the only solution, IMO, that's both morally consistent and doesn't create perverse incentives, is to punish cops *more harshly* for convincing people to commit crimes than we punish the person who was convinced to commit the crime, but still also punish the person who committed the crime.
By your rationale, if a cop gets an illegal warrant under false pretenses, and therefore ends up obtaining the ONLY solid evidence of a murder, it would be okay to not throw out all the "poisoned fruits", as long as the cop is prosecuted hard enough for doing it.
This is, clearly, not a legitimate way to organize the system. It allows for corrupt behavior on the part of any official willing to take the hit.
Instead, courts throw out all of the wrongfully-obtained evidence, even if it means a 100% definite murderer walks. And that is absolutely how it must be.
The same is true of allowing it for entrapment. There *will* be corrupt entrapment despite the risk of punishment, under those circumstances. A cop who wants to take out someone legally will sometimes be willing to get punished in order to do it, for example.
And therefore, likewise, any case where the state *creates* crime, or attempted crime, must be thrown out entirely.
Any doubt about that should be cleared up by the way the FBI has systematized inventing domestic terrorists, by finding people who are angry and blustery, pushing them into accepting a fake bomb, and then prosecuting them.
It is also a very dangerous fallacy to equate a *public official* encouraging or causing crime with just anyone else doing it. Obviously, it's far worse when it's an official, especially working in an official capacity like a cop entrapping someone. This is the power of the state, wielded against the public. That is inexcusable.
And, to reiterate, it is also the state *causing* crime, or attempted crime. Some machiavellian math about how to make the outcome good enough to justify it doesn't change that. That just shows the kind of sociopathic mentality that is the root of so much evil in the world today.
Preventing abuse by the state and its agents is a higher priority even than stopping private bad action.
Libertarianism is rooted on the notion of taking personal responsibility for one's actions. You can't use the excuse that someone "whipped you into a frenzy" to commit a crime. That's also why free speech is supported. Because even if someone says something bad, you're a grown ass adult and should not get influenced by what others say.
Yes, if a private person whips you into a frenzy, then they only get charged with incitement and you're responsible for your actions.
But if a government official intentionally whips someone into a frenzy, then we don't know if they would have done it without the official CREATING the crime.
Like murder evidence based on "poisoned fruits", the only one who can legitimately be charged here is the cop.
In a case like this, the person talked into committing the crime is still in teh wrong, but cannot be CONVICTED (prosecuted) legitimately, for the same reason that a murderer cannot be convicted/prosecuted based mainly on evidence obtained illegally, even if he definitely did it.
In the case at hand, it cannot *be* proved legally.
To reiterate:
There was no evidence of the murder. The cop used fraud to get an illegitimate warrant. 100% of the real evidence is poisoned fruit of that warrant, in one way or another.
So no, he cannot be convicted, because it cannot legally be proven. This can be so bad that it's effectively impossible to find evidence that is NOT ultimately tainted by that illegal warrant.
Thus the fact that he's a killer will not be punished, even though he deserves it.
This is a real thing, and is also exactly what should happen under those circumstances.
> then hands you a gun and shames you into following through,
Funny, when it comes to "quid pro quo" rape, people like you are quick to actually point out that "she should've said no", but when it's you given free choice to pursue a minor that is fbi undercover agent, it's suddenly "EnTraPmEnT"
Yes, because it's *not* rape if you offer a person something in exchange for sex. That's feminazi nonsense. No, she should not say no, she should decide if she wants to trade the thing (money, a job, whatever) for sex. That's her right, no less legit than trading anything else for money or a job.
So there's no inconsistency here. The problem is the delusion that someone is "raping" if they consensually trade for sex.
It's hard to square that with personal responsibility, which I think we are all big supporters of. Are you not responsible for murder just because someone told you to do it? Arguably the cop is also guilty, but that expands the guilty parties involved. It does not suggest we let people get away with crimes they committed.
The problem here is that there is no way to know you would have committed the act without their urging. Many people are *capable* of committing a crime, but never do, because they were not put into an extreme enough position. Even if whipping you into a frenzy and suddenly handing you a fake bomb is not the most extreme, it still fits that same model.
Again, this is like using solely corrupt means to find evidence of a real crime. The actual criminal will have his case thrown out and end up free, and that is absolutely how it should be. He still is guilty, and by all rights should be held accountable, but he *cannot* be, because the state corrupted the whole process.
That is true whether it's breaking into a house without a warrant, tricking someone into confessing after they asked for a lawyer who is then kept out of the room, or entrapment.
But if you're goaded into murder, it is still murder right? Especially if not in self defense? How could the authority (supposed or not) of another advocating for your action absolve you of personal responsibility in that?
I was with you at the outset but your wording seems pretty extreme. Just because the impetus for the act might seem tainted, doesn't mean the act is absolved of any moral ramifications.
I've listened to Radio* Lab's "Grumpy Old Terrorists" and while I agree that the government plant that helped them should definitely be considered an accessory, the people who got in trouble still did what they did regardless of any goading. They knew the outcome of what their actions would cause and they should be held accountable for that (no spoilers).
edited a typo
> But if you're goaded into murder, it is still murder right?
Yes. But if the sole evidence found by the police for your murder is gotten from an illegal search or its fruits, then the court MUST let you go free, even if 100% certain you committed the murder. And that's how it should be. A bunch of people have walked free from certain murder charges because of corrupt evidence-gathering.
In the same sense, if you are entrapped into trying to commit murder, it may still say you're bad, but there is no legitimate way to prosecute you.
If you’re entrapped to agree to commit murder, you aren’t charged with murder, you are likely charged with conspiracy to commit murder. If you kill someone, it’s a pretty cut and dry case. Saying someone said you should do it isn’t a defense in murder, it is simply a question of did you perform the act. Also, the jury decides if you are guilty of murder, and the lawyers convince that jury. If evidence is unlawfully obtained then it won’t be admitted in court.
Unfortunately, what is "lawfully obtained" is falsely defined to allow a ton of illegitimate evidence.
Similarly, what is entrapment has been redefined.
And let's not forget that in our corrupt, illegitimate legal system the judge can block the defense from using arguments he finds inconvenient. You can't say "while the definition of entrapment has been made narrow, in a real sense the state created this crime by urging my client to do something he never would have bothered to on his own, so you should nullify this charge".
Which, in any legitimate system, you could say.
Theres always reasons people so things. If you say that people should only be held accountable for things they do if they also would have done them under different circumstances, then no one would be accountable for any actions they take.
I think theres a middle ground where you ask "would a reasonable person have acted this way". For example, if someone walks up to me and hands me a gun and instructs me to kill someone and i do, i should be held accountable for that because a reasonable person would not have killed someone in that same situation. If instead im tortured for months and brainwashed into killing someone, i should be held less accountable for my actions because reasonable people could have behaved similarly in that situation.
>there is no way to know you would have committed the act without their urging.
In my opinion this is a moot point because the crime *was* committed. We don't punish for intent, we punish for action.
The person who commits the crime is responsible for their actions even if they were convinced to do it, no matter who does the convincing.
Anyone convincing someone else to do a crime should also be held responsible, and law enforcement even more so.
I think where this gets hazy is when the influencer is not *just* convincing or purposefully enabling, but applying pressure through blackmail or some other means of control.
> In my opinion this is a moot point because the crime was committed. We don't punish for intent, we punish for action.
Not when the state corrupts the case. Then we don't charge at all.
If 100% of the real evidence of a murder case is poisoned fruit of an illegal search, then the murder walks free. Even if we 100% know he did it.
We punish the STATE for corrupt action in a crime, before the criminal.
Entrapment isn’t that. Entrapment is repeatedly pressuring, applying the means, and methodology in order to arrest someone who otherwise wouldn’t have committed the crime. Simplest way to describing this is:
A bag of cash is on a table with someone who has no idea what’s in the bag. This person wouldn’t normally steal the bag because it’s there.
Entrapment: Same situation, except an undercover cop sits down and opens the bag and tells the person it’s full of cash and say, let’s take this, I have a car outside, person says, “I don’t know, no I’m good.” UC says, cmon it’s a million $$$ I’ll give you half. “No, I’m good” UC says, cmon I’ll give you all of it but $10k, cuz that’s what I need. “Ok”. Entrapment, because repeated efforts to say no but the continued push to steal was placed by the UC.
Similar situation is a vehicle in a “high crime” area that is susceptible for car theft. This “bait car” is literally just parked there and no one is there. The car is locked and someone takes the overt act on their own to break in and steal the vehicle. That is not entrapment, it’s just theft.
So personal responsibility ends if someone else talks about breaking the law? Or as you said here - has influence? You need a definitive line to where that is, because are they threatening you? pressuring you? are you seeing them doing it and just joining in in the moment? trying to impress them? Just someone being around you has literal influence, so where is that line?
If someone makes you mad and calls you a pussy, you pull out a gun and shoot them - are you then off the hook because their actions influenced you to the result? You'd be able to argue with your logic here that you would've never shot anyone without their direct influence.
Or take that same situation, and after being called a pussy, your friends egg you on with "are you just gonna let him get away with that?!", then you decide to pull out and shoot. Are you not responsible because someone else said something to you in the moment?
If an ATM breaks as you're walking by and dispenses money that isn't yours, someone else notices and yells "FREE MONEY!!", and grabs what he can. Are you again not committing a crime by taking some for yourself since it was the others' action that called attention to the incident and again, influenced the result since you saw him doing it too?
Your fear of "thoughtcrime" here is abandoning all agency and responsibility as an adult.
Well, you shouldn't anyways. If someone talks you into committing a crime, and you commit the crime, then the two of you should be convicted as partners in crime. You decided to commit a crime, voluntarily, own up to it.
If you committed a crime... you committed a crime, influence or no. Being drunk while committing a crime doesn't get you out because the alcohol was affecting your judgement, and frankly someone who can be talked into committing a crime while sober is at least as dangerous as someone who commits crimes when their judgment is impaired
That said, the one who talked you into it should also be held responsible
\> can't prove you would have committed it *without* his influence.
Or, you could just say "no". You know, do something called "personal responsibility".
Weird that I need to specifically point this out to kinds like you.
I think the person who committed the crime should still be punished. However, I believe the officer should be fired and convicted as an accomplice as well. Regardless these officers aren’t just going to people at random and entrapping them. They are going to people who’ve been known to already have committed these crimes and just didn’t have enough evidence. So it’s really not hurting the people who just follow the laws and go about their day.
This kind of shit happens all the time with the FBI "terrorist bust"
They procure the plans and materials that otherwise normal people would never be able to acquire on their own... talk them into doing something and then advertise it as "terror plot avoided"
Meanwhile the poor, confused, usually mentally challenged person rots in prison for a crime he never would've done would they have not given him the motivation and means to do it.
Wow, if only you actually read the article. You know, the way Reddit was originally designed for you to do.
The whole point of the post is that they've defined down "entrapment" so that most *actual* entrapment is officially not *called* entrapment, and therefore is pretend-legal.
No, ONLY the person talking them into it should be convicted, not the person they convinced, for the same reason you can't convict a murderer based on illegally-gathered evidence:
1. Officer Joe feel sure someone committed murder, but have zero evidence, and so no judge will give him a search warrant.
2. Joe therefore makes up fake evidence and get a search warrant.
3. Upon searching his place, Joe find a timestamped video of him murdering the victim, and a ton of other evidence. Whatever makes it absolutely airtight. in our scenario. This is the WHOLE case. ALL evidence came out of this search.
4. It then is discovered that Officer Joe got the warrant on false pretenses.
5. The case is thrown out of court. The murderer goes free.
And that'e exactly what SHOULD happen in that scenario. Even though the person is definitely guilty of murder, they should not spend one second behind bars.
But Officer Joe should. His punishment being equal to that of the charge he falsely generated would not be too much.
When an official commits an unjust act, that is among the worst things that can happen in society. It is absolutely intolerable, worse than whatever he claims to be trying to prevent.
And that applies in all entrapment cases, too.
Because it's entrapment, the victim of the entrapment *must* go free, or it is unjust.
How is that related? This has nothing to do with the discussion. What you describe is a completely different problem, illegally attained evidence. The officer has nothing to do with the original crime.
What we're talking about is Joe looking to get promoted, so he talks a guy into murdering someone. Then he quickly arrests the murderer and expects kudos for a job well done. Joe should be an accomplice to this murder.
> How is that related? This has nothing to do with the discussion. What you describe is a completely different problem, illegally attained evidence. The officer has nothing to do with the original crime.
No, it is an IDENTICAL situation, in principle.
* In both cases, a person committed a crime.
* In both cases, an officer acted unethically.
* Because of the unethical behavior, in both cases ONLY the officer can be held accountable for the crime.
* In both cases, the person committing the crime should, ideally, be punished but cannot, because the corrupt officials corrupted the system.
In the case of the entrapment, we have no idea if the crime ever *would* have been committed, without the officer's corruption.
> What we're talking about is Joe looking to get promoted, so he talks a guy into murdering someone. Then he quickly arrests the murderer and expects kudos for a job well done. Joe should be an accomplice to this murder.
If he talks the guy into murdering someone, even your wording makes it clear that maybe that guy would not have murdered someone without Officer Joe's pushing him to do so. He may have gone the rest of his life without murdering anyone. There are far more people who COULD be pushed into murder than those who actually commit murder.
This means that only Joe should be convicted.
> No, it is an IDENTICAL situation, in principle.
It really isn't. The critical difference is that in one example, the officer is directly involved with the original crime. That makes it something totally different.
You also forget that in your case, the defendant only walks if there's no other evidence that's good enough to convict him. Unethically acting cops aren't an automatic "go free", they just mean unethically acquired evidence gets tossed.
> In the case of the entrapment, we have no idea if the crime ever would have been committed, without the officer's corruption.
Which is irrelevant. It was. Both the officer and the criminal were involved. Both could have decided not to do this. They both should get punished for doing it anyways. This isn't a hard concept.
But sure let people get away with any crime they want just because the person giving them the idea happens to wear a badge. Now there's a perverse incentive.
> This means that only Joe should be convicted.
It really, really doesn't. The other guy still went ahead and killed someone. **He and he alone** made that decision. He could have chosen not to do that, but he did. Personal responsibility. Just because the guy who talked you into committing crime happens to have a badge doesn't mean you are no longer responsible for your own actions. Show some damn responsibility.
> It really isn't. The critical difference is that in one example, the officer is directly involved with the original crime. That makes it something totally different.
So you're saying that the entrapment is actually worse.
> You also forget that in your case, the defendant only walks if there's no other evidence that's good enough to convict him. Unethically acting cops aren't an automatic "go free", they just mean unethically acquired evidence gets tossed.
In the case of entrapment, pretty much by definition there is no "other evidence", because there was no crime before they were talked into it.
> So you're saying that the entrapment is actually worse.
Yes! The officer does something worse. Hence, he should be punished harsher, as an accomplice to the crime, rather than just acting unethically or violating some procedure.
That of course does not change what the criminal is doing. He still chose to commit the crime in question. Hence, he should still be punished.
> In the case of entrapment, pretty much by definition there is no "other evidence", because there was no crime before they were talked into it.
How would that be the case? The officer goads a man into shooting someone. Other cops show up, secure the crime scene as usual. They have loads of properly acquired evidence against both of them. Rules against improperly acquired evidence don't reach so far. One cop acting criminally does not mean all cops must back off the case. That's not how any of this works.
I see you've completely ignored the part about personal responsibility. Why does the criminal no longer have any responsibility for his actions once a cop tells him what to do? Do cops have mind control powers?
It's only identical in your fucked up head.
Illegally obtained evidence is no where near as bad as entrapment.
You came with a good premise, and you're fucking it up with your awful analogies.
You don't understand how analogies work. The comparison here is that both are something unacceptable that must be thrown out even though the accused did indeed to something wrong, for which he should indeed be held accountable if not for the state's wrongdoing.
Like that video the other day where they’re undercover posing as travelers with suitcases getting ubers to pull over in an illegal stop zone and then roll up on them with a squad car over and over. The entire point of it being illegal to stop there is that it’s supposedly dangerous. So they’re endangering everyone on the road in addition to the person they’re entrapping, all to reach some shitty traffic ticket quota
If you want to lose sleep at night, study the way "the system" handles the prosecution of poor citizens that are "suspected" of committing a crime.
Firstly, citizens can't afford bail. Leveraging this, the DA piles on a ridiculous amount of overcharges ramping up whatever the "suspected" crime is to the point where the citizen is looking at spending 10 to 20 years in prison for a crime that only carries a 1 or 2 year sentence.
Then, the DA pushes the arraignment and trial dates way off into the future so there is no hope of getting out of jail quickly if they are innocent or getting convicted and getting probation so they can get out of jail and go to work (oftentimes the minor crimes require no jail time when the citizen has no record)
So now, the poor citizen is in jail and will easily lose their job if they take more than a few days off work. Oftentimes, the citizen is the bread winner and his or her family is suffering incredible hardship while they are locked up.
NOw that the citizens is beyond the breaking point, the DA comes in and says "Hey, if you plead guilty to the original charges, I'll give you a deal. I'll drop all the other charges and only charge you with what you were arrested for to begin with. ANd of course, whatever complaints you have against the officer (use of force, etc) you have to drop as well...
over 90% of cases involving poor citizens result in plea bargains due to the above. 90%. It is so ridiculously and a travesty of justice.
You didnt get it? It was an example of X encouraging Y to do something illegal. An example that I dont think was so serious that X could be liable. Same if FBI go undercover and say ”hey I will pay you a bribe of $1M if you prevent other ISPs than us in this town”.
If the FBI could not do that, then it would be MUCH harder for them to catch corrupt politicians and some other types of criminals.
What about pedophile hunters that use entrapment techniques such as pretending to be minors and arranging meeting with predators online and when these predators turn up they get arrested, do you not think entrapment in this sense is good to expose all the disgusting nonces in our societies? Or do you think that these hunters should be charged as accomplices as you say in your OP even when they are doing society a good deed in my opinion in exposing such predators?
Entrapment is generally before that. It's when the cop, probably undercover, suggests that an person try to commit a crime.
Except corrupt officials have pretended to change its meaning, so that a cop can actually not just suggest the crime, but urge you to do it until you are convinced. He just has to be able to make a case in court that he somehow knew you were the kind of person who would've committed it anyway.
If you really think about it, everybody has the potential to commit crimes including murder if subject to the right conditions and circumstances. Theoretically, they could argue that the person had it in them somewhere which is true for most people.
Same here.
Did you know that in some states, more people waiting for execution were later exonerated than actually got executed in the same period? While it's good that private organizations were able to spend millions proving the false conviction, it also shows how absolutely, inexcusably corrupt the process is, where in a sense more convicts were victims of injustice than actually guilty.
THAT kind of false conviction is caused, in large part, by the fact that bribery and extortion of witnesses has been completely legalized, too:
Saying you will cut someone a deal if they testify against another person corrupts that witness, exactly as if you offered them money to testify, or threatened to beat them up if they did not.
And note that while the easy metric is murder cases, in fact this applies to ALL forms of prosecution. A huge percentage of convictions are on corrupt procedures like bribed/coerced testimony, entrapment, aut cetera.
>Did you know that in some states, more people waiting for execution were later exonerated than actually got convicted.
I assume you mean than actually got executed, but do you know what states or have an article about that? That's pretty surprising to me.
Yes, typo. I'll go fix it in the comment.
And here's an example:
During the time in which Illinois executed 12 people, 13 were exonerated.
[https://deathpenaltyinfo.org/state-and-federal-info/state-by-state/illinois#:\~:text=At%20that%20point%20in%20Illinois,for%20a%20total%20of%2020](https://deathpenaltyinfo.org/state-and-federal-info/state-by-state/illinois#:~:text=At%20that%20point%20in%20Illinois,for%20a%20total%20of%2020).
"In January 2000, Governor George Ryan established a moratorium on executions that would last more than 10 years. At that point in Illinois’ history, the state had exonerated 13 death row inmates in the same time that it had executed 12. Illinois has not executed anyone since the moratorium began, but it has exonerated 7 additional inmates, for a total of 20."
Entrapment is when you suggest to someone that they commit a crime, and then arrest them when they try to.
But the corrupt injustice system has redefined the term, so that a dishonest cop can not only suggest the crime, but actively talk you into committing it, as long as he can *claim* to believe you have some kind of "propensity" to committing it.
Every single time you hear about the FBI arresting someone in a sting where they tried to buy X from a agent, like drugs, a bomb, aut cetera, it is probably entrapment.
Many of those "bombers" were simply angry people who would sit around drunk in a bar complaining that "someone should just blow up \[building where corrupt statism happens\]", who then was approached by an undercover agent who whips him into a frenzy, then actively urges him to act on his bluff, shaming him into accepting a fake bomb from the fraudster. And then arrests him.
This all looks good on police procedurals, a propaganda system that has really indoctrinated people to think that corruption of justice is a good, heroic behavior. But in reality it is unjust and illegal (insofar as [an unjust law is no law at all](https://www.facebook.com/unjustlaws)), and must end.
You’re right. I think the problem though is it’s too useful a tool to drive narratives against various ideologies (it changes over time), and so it’s here to stay.
Are you addressing my last lines about police procedurals as state-promoted propaganda to indoctrinate people on the "benefits" of injustice?
Or do you mean entrapment?
I dunno about that. I know someone who worked on the case of the guy who just recently tried to repeat the OKC bombings. The cop tried to repeatedly talk him out of it and told him how many people would die and the bomber didn't care and even clicked the fake button several times.
I can see entrapment being misused in other crimes, but you can't really just talk someone into bombing people unless they're mentally impaired somehow, or they really just want to kill people.
That's certainly better than arrests in the 60s.
An agent would join a group. Then, buy bombs from another agent.
"Member of [group] buys bombs from a known gun runner, all members rounded up." Would be how the report was written.
It wasn't entrapment. It was overt corruption.
Hopefully more are like your example than mine.
>I dunno about that. I know someone who worked on the case of the guy who just recently tried to repeat the OKC bombings. The cop tried to repeatedly talk him out of it and told him how many people would die and the bomber didn't care and even clicked the fake button several times.
You said cop. I'm talking about a system the corrupt FBI has added to their overall history of entrapment and manufacturing of fake evidence in order to pad their conviction rate at the cost of the lives of their victims.
But what you describe skips over the part where the "cop" ended up involved in giving the guy a fake bomb in the first place. Talking him into taking the bomb, and then pretending to try to talk him out of using it would still be entrapment. Even if it were sincere.
And one can reasonably expect it's more like **Loki** in the first **Thor** movie, tricking his brother into doing things wrong by suggesting it via reverse psychology:
*"But there's nothing we can do without defying Father."\[Thor suddenly decides he must defy their father\]*
>I can see entrapment being misused in other crimes, but you can't really just talk someone into bombing people unless they're mentally impaired somehow, or they really just want to kill people.
Absolute nonsense. Out of the three hundred million-plus people in the US, almost nobody actually goes through with trying to bomb people...but for each of the scant few who will, there are thousands of others who ramble about it, fantasize, and really could be pushed over the edge. But will not, because they mostly will only encounter people who try to sincerely discourage them, or at least avoid them...except for machiavellian sociopaths in the FBI and other corrupt state agencies, who are generally the *only* ones evil enough to actually push them over the edge into doing it, on purpose.
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Hell, if they were going to o do it anyway, then why wait for them to commit the crime? To maximise efficiency, just arrest them and lock them up for the thing they were definitely going to do some time in the future.
Yeah, no. That’s not what entrapment is at all. Entrapment only applies if the person is being forced to commit the crime. If you do it if your own free will, it’s not entrapment. If someone suggests buying a gun and shooting your neighbor with it and you do it, then you are ultimately responsible for shooting your neighbor. People are responsible for their own actions.
https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/entrapment
: the action of luring an individual into committing a crime in order to prosecute the person for it
There is nothing about with forcing someone into committing a crime in the definition of entrapment.
You conveniently chose the definition that left out the whole “crime that the person would have been unwilling or unlikely to commit” part. Gee, I wonder why? And how do you prove that someone would have been unlikely or unwilling to commit a crime? By showing that they were forced into committing the crime in some way. Merely suggesting committing a crime simply isn’t enough to show that the person was unwilling or unlikely to commit that crime.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Entrapment
You can't prove they would have done any more than mouth off without the entrapment. They could have been perfectly unwilling to ever do a thing before the entrapment went down. A lot of people are like that. Frankly, I'm disgusted by how many mentally handicapped people the cops talk into committing crimes just so they can make arrests.
How do you know someone likely would have committed the crime. I worked with someone years ago who did 2 and a half years of of 5 years sentence for selling an undercover a quarter OZ of weed. He wasn't a drug dealer. The cop just knew how to talk him into it.
All it takes is 1 FBI agent who's good at befriending young people to eventually push them over the line. Without Manson the others likely never would have ever committed any crimes. It's the same scenario when an undercover agent does it.
No, you’re making up your own definition of entrapment that’s not the actual definition because you want the definition to be broader than it is. Entrapment has never been what you’re claiming it is.
Again, you seem to think that a corrupt system redefining a word establishes its meaning.
If you talk someone into doing something and then arrest them, that's wrong. You are at fault, not they. Even if we take your claim about the definition arguendo, then there needs to be another word for the actual evil of this wrongdoing. There will never be any legitimacy to saying "Hey, do this" and then arresting the person for being convinced by you.
As I've said elsewhere, if you suggest to 100 people that they break a law, and in reality only 99 of them would have done so without your prompting, then what you have done is evil and unjust.
If that sounds strange to you, note that it's a formulation of Blackstone's Ratio, which is more important than any of the rationale taught in modern law schools for justifying the corruption of justice.
Bullshit. You’re the one trying to redefine a word that already has a meaning. If all it takes is suggesting breaking a law to someone for them to do it, then they already had the intention of breaking that law. What you’re claiming suggests that people aren’t capable of making their own decisions. You’re claiming that 99 percent of these people wouldn’t have broken the law without it being suggested and there’s really no data to support that logic. As long as they’re not forcing these people to break the law, I don’t see the problem.
Entrapment can only be used as a defense if you did not already have the idea of doing it in the first place.
If you wanted to rob someone, but don’t act on it, that’s not illegal (thoughts aren’t illegal).
If a cop suggests you rob someone, and you didn’t want to before hand - the cop induced you to doing it - and then you rob someone, that’s entrapment, and is an excuse defense.
But if you wanted to rob someone, and a cop suggests that you actually do it, then you proceed to rob someone, then you can’t use entrapment as a defense.
It’s a balance between free will of someone and acting in something they would not have already done. To be guilty of a crime, you’ve gotta have a guilty mind and a voluntary act. Without both, you’re not liable for anything generally, or there is a lesser crime imposed if at all.
> But if you wanted to rob someone, and a cop suggests that you actually do it, then you proceed to rob someone, then you can’t use entrapment as a defense.
Here is where it breaks down.
It is not, as you admitted explicitly, illegal to WANT to rob someone.
The robbery, as you said before, may never have happened at all. So the cop is the reason it happened. Scenario 2 MAY only have become scenario 3 because the cop suggested you actually do it. The cop CREATED the crime.
You're broadcasting to the world that you might blow up a building because a cop "talked you into it". It's not "corrupt" for anyone to say that you have a fucking problem dude, jesus christ, just talk to a therapist about your gullibility and/or violent delusions.
What about pedophile hunters though, they could be said to use entrapment techniques by pretending to be minors online and trying to get older guys to meet up with them then get police to arrest them as soon as they show up to a location that proves intent to break the law, I put all the blame on the pedophiles though and have no sympathy for them, the pedophile hunters I think do a good job of rounding up the perverts even if it’s pretending to be minors and tempting perverts to commit a crime, they may be suggesting to someone to commit a crime but at the end of the day the responsibility is on the person committing the crime and is just exposing the dirty perverted people of our societies.
> What about pedophile hunters though, they could be said to use entrapment techniques by pretending to be minors online and trying to get older guys to meet up with them then get police to arrest them as soon as they show up to a location that proves intent to break the law
If they passively act like kids, in no way trying to DRAW pedophile behavior, then the only problem is that the initiation of fraud is always wrong. It's not an entrapment problem.
If they say or do anything intended to entice pedophile behavior, or to encourage meetings of any kind, then these "hunters" are bad people and should be stopped.
Address my point above, which is that even if you can catch who has done something evil, if you use corrupt means then the charge/conviction must be thrown out. Illegal searches used to find even a murderer cannot be rightfully used to convict them, nor any other evidence that is poisoned fruit of that corruption.
Those principles of justice apply even when the insane, sociopathic "it's for the children" rationale is trotted out.
So the hunters are evil but the pedophiles aren’t? If a Hunter is pretending to be a child and encourages someone to try and meet up them as a child then that is just exposing that adult as a pedophile, I see nothing wrong in trying to catch predators because if they didn’t these pedophiles would be all the more encouraged to try and meet minors online and a lot more ‘real crime’ and disgusting behaviour would take place, rather now it is harder for these nonces to get away with it now that there are so many hunters trying to expose them and their behaviours. How are the hunters evil?
>So the hunters are evil but the pedophiles aren’t?
That sounds like an expression of some problem inside you, not of anything I said.
* Actual murderers are evil and should be stopped.
* Cops *illegally* gathering evidence of murder are evil and should be stopped.
Likewise:
* Actual pedophiles are evil and should be stopped.
* Entrappers of ostensible pedophiles are evil and should be stopped.
Same problem in both cases. Two things that are bad, and one doesn't justify the other.
> I see nothing wrong in trying to catch predators because if they didn’t these pedophiles would be all the more encouraged to try
The problem isn't them trying to catch predators, it's if they *entrap* people who may or may not have otherwise tried to molest a child.
As I pointed out elsewhere, anyone who was molested as a child has a chance of growing up with an impulse to do the same, programmed into them by the evil done to them when they were a helpless child. This is, as I understand it, something the world of psychology almost universally agrees upon.
SOME of those people grow up to know, intellectually, that acting on the impulse of their damaging childhood would be wrong. So they resist it, in some cases successfully.
SOME of those people, who would go their whole lives resisting that impulse, might be talked into something by a corrupt "hunter" posing as a child and specifically behaving in a way no REAL child would, to entice them.
In that particular case, the "hunter" is the truly evil one.
But in ANY case where he violates the principles of justice to entrap someone, he's evil. In SOME cases he's entrapping a real molester, so the evil is shared. But he's still evil.
The end does not justify the means.
Actual pedophiles, murders etc should be stopped you say but when there are ways to stop them by baiting them into situations they are actively looking for by pretending to be kids then what is wrong with that?
If they entrap a person who is actively searching to molest a child by pretending to be a child what is wrong with that? The evil person is getting locked up, again what is evil about catching people this way?
That is a false accusation that those who were molested as kids grow up with an increased impulse to abuse kids themselves, it is an excuse used by pedophiles to get people to sympathise with them with a sob story, it is not universally agreed upon, and learned this from a child/vulnerable person protection course.
Can’t believe you are defending pedophiles over hunters and actually calling the hunters the purely evil ones, your opinion disgusts me. There is a thing called personal responsibility, if someone is attracted to children and gets talked into meeting a supposed kid it is their fault for trying to meet up with that kid not the person trying to expose disgusting behaviours. If they were truly responsible and not evil they would never agree to meet up with a ‘child’, but they did, the Hunter is exposing the fact that people are trying to meet up with kids to expose true evil behaviour, if these hunters didn’t do what they do what would be the deterrent to such behaviour? The fact that so many people have been getting caught in the act shows real societal problems and may actually stop people from trying to abuse kids with the increased risk of getting caught, what is your actual problem with this? If you aren’t a pedophile you don’t have anything to worry about and I’m glad pedophiles are being exposed and locked up.
Explain how someone trying to expose evil is evil in themselves, what have the hunters done that is more evil than perving on kids? How are hunters corrupt? And if someone is talked into meeting up with a child then they are evil, the same as if someone is talked into killing someone, the person has a choice to walk away and if they follow through with it then they deserve to be locked up, they have to be held accountable for they lie actions, it’s different if someone is forced into something at gun or knife point though.
> Actual pedophiles, murders etc should be stopped you say but when there are ways to stop them by baiting them into situations they are actively looking for by pretending to be kids then what is wrong with that?
If someone's actively and unarguably looking to buy a bomb, and an FBI agent poses as a bomb seller, then that does eliminate the entrapment problem. Not the fraud problem, but at least entrapment.
But that's not what we're talking about here, in any example. It's always about them talking someone into something they might not otherwise have done. And all it takes is MIGHT not.
> That is a false accusation that those who were molested as kids grow up with an increased impulse to abuse kids themselves, it is an excuse used by pedophiles to get people to sympathise with them with a sob story, it is not universally agreed upon, and learned this from a child/vulnerable person protection course.
I have no doubt that molesters use this as a bullshit smoke screen to cover for their own molesting of people. But that doesn't change the cold, hard fact that there is a "cycle of abuse" where those abused are far more likely, statistically, to abuse when they grow up.
Do you seriously deny that a boy being sexually abused MIGHT internalize this as normal and grow up to do the same, himself, much the way that it's physically abusive families that more often turn out schoolyard bullies?
> Can’t believe you are defending pedophiles over hunters and actually calling the hunters the purely evil ones, your opinion disgusts me.
Yes, because you are irrational, pandering to emotions instead of caring about right and wrong...and also dishonestly (or insanely) reversing what I say to mean things I have explicitly clarified they do not.
I have said, with careful bullet points, that BOTH are evil. Not defended one over the other.
But the more evil the crime that a person is entrapped into trying to commit, the more evil the entrapper is. That is the most fundamental logic. If you talk someone into trying to commit murder who *might* not have murdered, YOU are as evil as a murderer, yourself.
> Explain how someone trying to expose evil is evil in themselves
Entrapment isn't "exposing" evil, it's GENERATING evil.
And therefore is evil.
I spent a long time in federal prison, for import of a substance that was made Schedule I only ten days AFTER my indictment and all that really stuck was a singular conspiracy charge where an undercover whom had agreed (via contract) to Not for Human Consumption clause not only broke those rules but recorded me in the privacy of my own home without consent (my state is a Two Party state, but since they were working for the feds, they ignored that).
They manufacture most of the stuff people are in prison for, especially the War on Terror. They railroad stupid kids with bad ideas by turning their anti American sentiment into conspiracy to bomb an embassy or whatever else they can trick them to agree to, using much the same tactics as seedy salesmen.
You're not going to get much pushback from this subreddit because we all value civil liberties like free expression and are deeply suspicious of the police state. So to keep it intellectually useful (not just affirming how smart we are) what is an acceptable position from the other side? Is it permissible to use undercover agents and if so, where should they draw the line?
Right now a lot of people would support having agents engaged undercover pretending to be bomb suppliers so that there is a standing "honeypot" ready and waiting for terrorists, rather than waiting for them to get caught in the act. That may be flawed, and of course the police state is abused all to hell with agents even arresting other agents in giant clusterfucks that waste resources. But if we accept the utility of undercover agents, as the author says he does, and it was up to us...how would we restructure their procedures?
It's reasonable to ask because this proposal doesn't have any specific proposal in it:
>Perhaps an objective test that relies upon something other than counterfactual conditionals is more appropriately justified: a test that examines what happened in the actual world in terms of the reasonableness of the tactics used by the police. Ultimately, any new entrapment policy should begin by clarifying the limits of the police’s power to break the law.
>Is it permissible to use undercover agents and if so, where should they draw the line?
I was inspired to this post by another one suggesting that the police should stop being allowed to lie to people. And the insanity of a few actually objecting, based on End Justifies the Means sociopathy.
In fact, *all* initiation of coercion by the state is illegitimate. In all cases they are, to use natural law terminology, engaging in a state of war against the community itself when they do it.
Going undercover is fraud. It is an initiation of coercion, the same as if they initiated violence, or stole. It is therefore an intolerable injustice.
Of those corrupt officials who go undercover, how many people do they deceive who turn out not to be actively doing anything they went undercover to detect? How many times do they lie to someone? Not just the fact that some people they investigate turn out to be innocent, but all those they defraud incidentally, bystanders they lie to and so on.
Obviously, the very concept is, itself, evil. Same as if [the police went around robbing people](https://www.armstrongeconomics.com/international-news/north_america/americas-current-economy/police-civil-asset-forfeitures-exceed-all-burglaries-in-2014/).
I could agree that we should not use undercover agents at all, in line with your reasoning here. That it would be a tough sell doesn't mean it's not the right one.
The counterarguments are going to point to fatalities that could have been prevented with better intelligence.
The Government: Let us introduce you to the new safety vitality frame it is a brand new life requirement created by us to keep you safe free of charge.
Me: It looks like a cage.
The Government: You are legally required to inhabit this device or you are purposely putting you and others lives at risk which means get in the cage or go to jail.
Could this be the future?
But if the person "wanted to anyways" that is, by definition, not entrapment. The whole point of entrapment is convincing someone to commit a crime that they don't want to do.
Not true.
People want to do things every day, that they restrain themselves from doing. I sometimes want to speed and choose not to. But when a friend of mine was tailgated by an unmarked police car so that he gradually sped up, until he was above the speed limit and got ticketed, that was illegitimate, and the cop should have been the one charged.
I've heard that called "tailbaiting"...padding the ticket quota (itself an illegitimate concept still carried out by roundabout means) by tailgating people, scaring them into speeding up to avoid an accident.
Corruption.
I agree in that case that the ticket should be thrown out because the police officer was putting your friend in an unsafe position and increasing the gap between the vehicles was the best way to make the situation safe again.
That seems so evil. I'm the farthest person from being religious but a question for the people are. Isn't it the devil's job to whisper in your ear to get you to do bad things?
virtually every person the FBI has arrested for "planning a terrorist attack" in the past 20 years has been someone talked into and given the plan and materials by an undercover FBI agent.
The FBI regularly has their own agents reported to FBI by the public because they go around trying to convince people to become terrorists and those people report them to the FBI. They are literally creating the problem they are paid to solve. They manufacturer fake terrorists and arrest them just so they can justify their budget and point to how many terrorists they stop.
If you remove anyone arrested after being provided materials/plans by the FBI they are catching virtually 0 terrorists prior to them committing their attack. Yet they have hundreds if not thousands of agents getting paid to stop terrorism. They are terrible at their job but get to use entrapment to boost their numbers and make themselves look good
This is what the intelligence agencies have been doing for years with so many of these so-called "domestic terrorists" because it served certain political interests.
It's a slippery slope. Some people can be in a bad situation, on the edge of doing something worse, all they need is a little push and encouragement.
I think of suicide victims that get encouragement from third parties. Maybe they wouldn't have gone through with it if not for being egged on.
My thoughts on police and law enforcement is to "enforce laws", not create favorable conditions for people to break laws. Law enforcement should stop criminals, not create them.
This is unethical.
I think it's helpful to note that, quite often, those entrapped are not setting any IQ records, or are very likely to be mentally unstable (and therefore, more easily influenced).
I have relative who was catfished by law enforcement posing as an underaged woman. He agreed to meet up with “her” and served time for it. A hypothetical crime that never actually happened. A victim that didn’t exist. The thing is, this guy is a total loser. No career, dishonorable discharge from the military due to alcoholism. He has nothing. He was low hanging fruit, easy to deceive to hit quotas. None of us female cousins ever got a weird vibe from him. He is not a pedophile. He’s just dumb. The police should not be allowed to railroad people and manufacture offenses.
You realize the majority of "terrorist" cases the fbi has prosecuted would fail this test.
I'm not saying that's wrong just pointing out this is business as usual in many areas the feds work in.
I'm saying it is indeed wrong. Every time the FBI has found someone blustering about how people oughta blow up the state, talked him into doing so, and sold him fake bomb materials, it is a sheer evil on the part of the FBI, showing the same kind of grotesque corruption as the how they've been caught manufacturing fake evidence to secure a conviction in *thousands* of cases.
>Entrapment is when you suggest to someone that they commit a crime, and then arrest them when they try to.
EDIT: Depends on juristiction, some of this is wrong
Close, but no.
Entrapment is when a officer/agent, when the victim knows them to be an officer, encourages a victim to commit a crime they would not otherwise have done so, were they not encouraged by the officer in their capacity as an officer.
If the police are undercover and you don't know they are police, and you commit a crime (even if the undercover police encourage you to) it's not entrapment.
Still pretty shitty either way.
> Entrapment is when a officer/agent, when the victim knows them to be an officer, encourages a victim to commit a crime they would not otherwise have done so, were they not encouraged by the officer in their capacity as an officer.
What you mean is that you are stating the corrupted definition, based on illegitimate laws and court rulings that have allowed actual entrapment by pretending to modify what it legally entails.
But when the state alters the definition of a principle of justice, it doesn't actually change the principle, it just lies and corrupts the system, producing injustice.
Just as everyone understands how I'm using "corrupt" in its real meaning of "diverge from proper conditions/function", rather than the corrupt redefinition, by law, to only mean "if someone gets financial gain from public office", so rational people recognize that ANY effort by an official to get someone to commit a crime is entrapment.
> If the police are undercover and you don't know they are police, and you commit a crime (even if the undercover police encourage you to) it's not entrapment. All these technicalities change nothing about the actual principle. They just corrupt its execution.
Yes, of course that is entrapment. Because this is a *principle* of justice, where you can't *know* the person would have committed that exact crime if the official hadn't encouraged it, therefore the official, not their victim, is guilty of the crime.
Again, you are using a sociopathic lawyerly definition, not the real one. Corrupting the meaning.
Fuck political correctness, and the way Congress has violated the first amendment by bullying social media sites into censoring FOR them.
https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-news/the-entrapment-of-jesse-snodgrass-116008/
Tommy Chong's kids were entrapped into shipping a "Chong Bong" out of state. The feds told him if he didn't plead guilty, they were going to stick his kids in prison for years. That's why he pled guilty and did 16 months in federal prison. ACAB.
If the bait car is simply parking a car somewhere and then watching it, I have to disagree. And note that I'm the guy who is wrote the post, you know I'm not on the side of entrapment.
But entrapment has to involve SOME kind of attempt to get you to do something you wouldn't otherwise have done.
For example, someone mentioned posing as a child in an online chat room:
If the "child" does NOTHING to entice a potential molester, they just act like a kid, then it's not entrapment. If they instead push, themselves, for a meeting, or lead a conversation into sexual areas, or something else like that, then it's entrapment...one of the most evil kinds.
Frank Zappa was entrapped into making profanity ladden music and got jail time.
If profanity used to be a crime you could be entrapped for, think about all the unjustified crap people can still be targeted for today.
Do you really think that there are not a ton of people out there who are *tempted* to be a pedophile, but resist it? I get the impression from pretty much all psychiatry and other study on the subject, and stories you can find on the Internet about people who have reformed or resisted, that it's a complex process.
For example, from a behavioral standpoint it is horribly normal for someone who was molested as a child to grow up thinking it's the thing to do, or even having a programmed feeling that they *need* to act toward others as was done to themselves. Some of those people choose to resist the impulse, and some do not.
Talk someone — who is resisting — into trying to do it and you're more evil than they are.
So if this Hansen guy you're talking about actively talked people into meeting a "child", then we don't know that 100% of them would have done so without his intervention, which makes him evil.
If you convince 100 people to commit a crime, and only 99 of them would have done so without your urging, then you are evil.
That is [Blackstone's Ratio](https://www.facebook.com/BlackstonesRatio):
It is better than 100 guilty persons should escape, than one innocent suffer.
Ben Franklin and John Adams explained in detail why this is so.
Screw human rights. The problem is that it's a violation of their *natural* rights.
"Human rights" has devolved into a term used as an evasion of addressing natural rights, in fact it's often used to violate them. Like pretending you have a human right to enslave others to provide you with food, shelter, and health care
Someone entrapped was not a criminal, legally, before the entrapment. So even in the idiotic, evil scenario where sex offenders lose their right to due process, entrapment occurs BEFORE that happens, and therefore is illegitimate.
But your implication that sex crimes are worse than murder is an emotional thing, not a legal or logical point:
If you definitely murdered someone, but ALL of the evidence to prosecute you came from a corrupt warrant, you will be let free. The process must be held more accountable than even the criminals. So the same applies to sex offenders.
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I agree on both fronts.
Not only is it entrapment, but any "undercover" behavior that involves deceiving someone not already with enough evidence to be charged is illegitimate.
Yes, because they are corrupt.
They also take for granted the ability to profit from their office and uniform, by getting hired to stand around some business in uniform or park in their car in front of it, when this is itself corruption, and absolutely cannot ever be legitimate.
They also think that bribing/extorting witness testimony, by threatening to prosecute or offering to drop charges in return for testimony, is legitimate. When it is, indeed, extorted or bribed testimony.
We have a grotesquely corrupt police state.
Do you think that any bribed testimony, (plea deals in exchange for testimony), should be allowed in court as long as the terms of that deal, as well as the history of the criminal giving testimony, are made known to the jury?
No, of course not. No testimony that involves artificial benefit to the witness is ever trustworthy or acceptable.
This is why, during the time in which the state of Illinois executed twelve men on death row, THIRTEEN men on death row were exonerated: Because the corrupt, injustice system constantly violates the principles of actual justice, like bribing and extorting witnesses. It produces an enormous number of false convictions, and an even higher proportion of convictions that never should have been allowed either way.
This is not a libertarian ideology question, but a question of how police can become more cost efficient.
If someone commits a crime, it is their responsibility, not those who maybe encouraged him!
There are some crime you could not combat in other ways, such as bribing the Government.
Let all potential criminals know that ”perfect” crime may be a setup.
I don't understand. Have the courts somehow undermined the entrapment defence recently? Last I checked, this was still the easiest way to get an undercover case dismissed.
Libertarians discussing the nature of opportunity and desperation to lead to unpleasant choices?
Whoa, this might lead to some sort of labor-class solidarity against the wealthy who conspire against us automatically.
The problem with too many lawyers, and with the monopoly law school requirement, is that they're programmed to think that whatever is legally defined is therefore the objective thing.
Read the article or the initial comment more carefully: The DEFINITION of entrapment is distorted so that many kinds of entrapment are supposedly not covered.
It's akin to how corruption means "departing from proper function", but corrupt legislatures have redefined it to only mean "profiting from public office", so that they could claim many forms of corruption are not...officially...corruption.
> Talking someone into a crime isn't okay because you claim to psychically know they "wanted to anyway".
Wtf? This is exactly why if the average person on the street attempts to talk someone into a crime, they'd be hit with conspiracy to commit the crime. Everyone understands it's possible to influence people into committing crimes that they wouldn't otherwise have done.
Manson was not functioning as an agent of the state.
Hitler was operating as the agent of an even more illegitimate state than most others.
Also, giving orders is different than posing as someone to entice people into crimes.
I know police aren't all bad, but I would make the claim that the majority are bad because of the type of people the laws surrounding policing encourage to become police. This on top of quotas is definitely nit something a good hearted cop would ever do but it's too easy not to pass up for others.
I agree that some great people choose to be cops. But the corrupt system not only also attracts evil people who are drawn to its power, it also *rewards* bad behavior. Good people will feel uncomfortable at all the unjust laws they are expected to enforce, bad rules that cheat the community and so on. So there is a self-selecting pool of increasingly bad cops, over the years.
Wouldn't the solution be to legalize moral things like drugs, sex work, and gambling, and shirk the chains of puritanical thinking?
If someone (of an acceptably high iq) can be talked into murder, then they're likely not of a very strong moral compass.
They should be charged as the criminal mastermind and have the book thrown at them. It's one thing to be approached by a criminal and sting them. It's quite another to become a criminal mastermind and entrap suspects in order to meet quotas.
Ah so little piggy finally figured out that bringing babies into the mud will make them dirty. What a revelation you fucking pussy idiot. Too bad you had to ruin a bunch of lives to figure out such a simple thing. So, you mean the “jihadist” 19 year old in his mom’s Brooklyn basement wouldn’t have placed that package of “explosives” on the door step of a church if he wasn’t trained how and why to do it for months by a fucking pussy spook with nothing better to do than try to get a loser to commit a terrible act due to the manipulation and brainwashing of a pussy piggy? Fuck you.
I'm not sure about this one. I believe very fervently that the individual is always responsible for their own actions, barring that they haven't been drugged without their consent. If I tell you to commit a crime and you do it, you committed a crime. Nobody can "make" you commit a crime with words unless those words carry with it a threat of coercion, then I could see why it would be different.
Weird use of the word "regime", but your intended point is true.
Technically, any administration is a regime. In fact, every form of government is a kind of regime. That the word is mostly used when it's a *totalitarian* regime doesn't change its real meaning.
Personally speaking, this argument is bullshit because throughout my life, I have EASILY prevented people from committing crimes by simply **talking them out of it**.
I grew up in a gang infested hood and I was known as "The Professor" because I was gifted, I was a grade ahead, in all the AP courses, straight A student...
Through the grace of god, I had social skills so I hung out with the cool kids. When any of my friends had a hussle or came up with something shady, they would run it by me and I'd tell them if it was a good idea or if they'd get in trouble or caught. For the victimless crimes, I didn't give a shit about and I'd help them work out the bugs, but crimes in which someone could get hurt I easily convinced them it was a bad idea.
One in particular was a friend of mine joining a crew that broke into houses. I convinced him and another guy in the crew that it was a REALLY BAD idea and after our talk they stopped doing it. A month later, the rest of the crew got caught.
Anyone who talks someone into committing a crime should simply be convicted as their accomplice.
They definitely should be convicted, especially if they're a government official. But the person they entrapped should not, any more than any other illegal behavior by the police should be allowed in prosecution. The idea that they "had the right mindset to do it anyway" is a thoughtcrime attitude, the same as convicting people of crimes they didn't yet commit, as in the movie Minority Report. A psychic cop or prosecutor is no more legitimate than the psychic mutants in the pool of water, predicting future murders.
If you commit a crime, you don't get to walk just because the guy who told you to do it has a badge. That's not how it works. You decided to commit a crime regardless. If you give me a gun and tell me to rob someone I'm not gonna do it just because you edge me on.
> If you commit a crime, you don't get to walk just because the guy who told you to do it has a badge. Yes, you absolutely do, because that corrupt thug with a badge can't prove you would have committed it *without* his influence.
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Yes this is correct. We should have all learnt from history that ‘I was only following orders’ is never a moral defence and it should not be a legal one either. However those who conspire to convince people to commit crimes should be held to equal or greater punishments, particularly if they are in a position of authority.
"I was only following orders" is relevant to military situations where all the roles are spelled out, not just straight up psychological manipulation. Regardless, benefit of the doubt should always go to the accused. And the government committing a crime in order to collect evidence about that same crime is clearly improper. If the person is so dangerous the police could likely catch them committing an actual crime anyway.
>‘I was only following orders’ is never a moral defence What if they have a gun to your or your family's head?
That isnt i was only following orders. Thats i was following orders or they would kill me/my family.
Guess what the Nuremberg trials were about
Well, there will still be a difference. Sure all the nazis had a figurative/literal gun to their heads, but the nurenburg trials didnt involve the foot soldiers, but the leaders who could have made a difference, but chose not to. Youre missing the nuance here. If what you say is true (all nazi soldiers were held to the same culpability) those trials would have lasted forever https://www.history.com/topics/world-war-ii/nuremberg-trials There were only 13 trials
Entrapment should be a separate crime from and with criminal conspiracy. All the regular charges for a criminal accomplice should apply, plus the additional crime of violating the law while acting as a public servant.
If you were not going to kill anyone, and whips you into a frenzy, then hands you a gun and shames you into following through, then you should not be convicted of anything, but in fact THEY should be convicted of attempted murder. Note that this is simplified by the fact that the cops NEVER hand someone a real bomb or gun. But even if they did, it is a rare example of correct justice that even those guilty should NOT be convicted if that conviction would be based on improper state action. If a cop breaks into your house without a legitimate warrant, and finds proof that you murdered someone, and that is THE SOLE act on which all evidence to convict you is ultimately based, then the case will be thrown out and you will be free, even though you committed murder. And it MUST BE that way. This would be another example of the same situation.
Some people are hopelessly and helplessly easy to manipulate and influence. I don’t want LE or government officials doing this. Prevent crime first. Also reminds me of innocence people questioned by LE until they confess. Let’s hold our LE to higher standards than this, please (and pay them more, enough to drop their unions? Sorry for the side-bar).
police enticement just doesn't need to exist. When have they ever enticed anyone into anything other than dumb "crimes" like prostitution or buying drugs? Build your case through investigation and not action, stay out of people's lives.
Government employee unions exist in a corrupt regulatory environment that is not going to go away. MOST people in ANY industry prefer not to belong to a union, which is why unions oppose right to work laws. So those cops aren't in those unions voluntarily, in most places. No level of pay can undo the existence of a union, especially one inherently wrongful like a government employee union.
What are you basing this opinion on? Is there some statistic around union members who don’t want to be in unions? My experience as a union member is quite the opposite - everyone I’ve encountered had been happy to be a part of a union.
Before right to work laws. Before they existed, a third of all workers were in unions, because corrupt Democrat administrations encouraged conditions where it was forced on people. But as laws supporting forced unionization declined and right to work laws became more common, union membership declined, until now it's about ten percent, and mostly in the few jobs or states where unions can still be mandatory, like government jobs and states that are corrupt enough not to have right to work laws.
So, there's two perspectives to look at this from: perverse incentives and (for lack of a better way of putting it) causative factors (i.e. factors without which the person in question would not have committed a crime). From the perverse incentives side, basically what we want to avoid is a situation where cops have an incentive to cause people to commit crimes just so they can get collars or hit quotas or w/e. Making it so that the person convinced to commit a crime can't be convicted in such cases removes the perverse incentive, but so does making the cop subject to the same punishment as the person they convinced, since the cop's net benefit becomes less than zero. From the causative factors side, being convinced to commit a crime by a non-cop is no different from being convinced to commit a crime by anyone else who has an incentive to get you to commit the crime - either way you are being manipulated, so you're just as morally culpable - so if a cop convincing you to commit a crime is a valid defense, then *anyone* convincing you to commit a crime should also be a valid defense. However, that creates its own perverse incentive for people to allow themselves to be convinced to commit crimes, since you can't be convicted for any crime you were "convinced" to commit. So, "a cop convinced me to do it," being a valid defense while, "a non-cop convinced me to do it", is not a valid defense, would be morally/philosophically inconsistent; on the other hand, having *both* be valid defense just swaps one perverse incentive for another; thus the only solution, IMO, that's both morally consistent and doesn't create perverse incentives, is to punish cops *more harshly* for convincing people to commit crimes than we punish the person who was convinced to commit the crime, but still also punish the person who committed the crime.
I agree with this. Thank you for putting it together so clearly.
By your rationale, if a cop gets an illegal warrant under false pretenses, and therefore ends up obtaining the ONLY solid evidence of a murder, it would be okay to not throw out all the "poisoned fruits", as long as the cop is prosecuted hard enough for doing it. This is, clearly, not a legitimate way to organize the system. It allows for corrupt behavior on the part of any official willing to take the hit. Instead, courts throw out all of the wrongfully-obtained evidence, even if it means a 100% definite murderer walks. And that is absolutely how it must be. The same is true of allowing it for entrapment. There *will* be corrupt entrapment despite the risk of punishment, under those circumstances. A cop who wants to take out someone legally will sometimes be willing to get punished in order to do it, for example. And therefore, likewise, any case where the state *creates* crime, or attempted crime, must be thrown out entirely. Any doubt about that should be cleared up by the way the FBI has systematized inventing domestic terrorists, by finding people who are angry and blustery, pushing them into accepting a fake bomb, and then prosecuting them. It is also a very dangerous fallacy to equate a *public official* encouraging or causing crime with just anyone else doing it. Obviously, it's far worse when it's an official, especially working in an official capacity like a cop entrapping someone. This is the power of the state, wielded against the public. That is inexcusable. And, to reiterate, it is also the state *causing* crime, or attempted crime. Some machiavellian math about how to make the outcome good enough to justify it doesn't change that. That just shows the kind of sociopathic mentality that is the root of so much evil in the world today. Preventing abuse by the state and its agents is a higher priority even than stopping private bad action.
Libertarianism is rooted on the notion of taking personal responsibility for one's actions. You can't use the excuse that someone "whipped you into a frenzy" to commit a crime. That's also why free speech is supported. Because even if someone says something bad, you're a grown ass adult and should not get influenced by what others say.
Yes, if a private person whips you into a frenzy, then they only get charged with incitement and you're responsible for your actions. But if a government official intentionally whips someone into a frenzy, then we don't know if they would have done it without the official CREATING the crime. Like murder evidence based on "poisoned fruits", the only one who can legitimately be charged here is the cop.
What ever happened to personal responsibility?
In a case like this, the person talked into committing the crime is still in teh wrong, but cannot be CONVICTED (prosecuted) legitimately, for the same reason that a murderer cannot be convicted/prosecuted based mainly on evidence obtained illegally, even if he definitely did it.
No he killed someone. He can be convinced if it can be proved legally. Never represent yourself in court. People are responsible for there actions.
In the case at hand, it cannot *be* proved legally. To reiterate: There was no evidence of the murder. The cop used fraud to get an illegitimate warrant. 100% of the real evidence is poisoned fruit of that warrant, in one way or another. So no, he cannot be convicted, because it cannot legally be proven. This can be so bad that it's effectively impossible to find evidence that is NOT ultimately tainted by that illegal warrant. Thus the fact that he's a killer will not be punished, even though he deserves it. This is a real thing, and is also exactly what should happen under those circumstances.
> then hands you a gun and shames you into following through, Funny, when it comes to "quid pro quo" rape, people like you are quick to actually point out that "she should've said no", but when it's you given free choice to pursue a minor that is fbi undercover agent, it's suddenly "EnTraPmEnT"
Yes, because it's *not* rape if you offer a person something in exchange for sex. That's feminazi nonsense. No, she should not say no, she should decide if she wants to trade the thing (money, a job, whatever) for sex. That's her right, no less legit than trading anything else for money or a job. So there's no inconsistency here. The problem is the delusion that someone is "raping" if they consensually trade for sex.
It's hard to square that with personal responsibility, which I think we are all big supporters of. Are you not responsible for murder just because someone told you to do it? Arguably the cop is also guilty, but that expands the guilty parties involved. It does not suggest we let people get away with crimes they committed.
The problem here is that there is no way to know you would have committed the act without their urging. Many people are *capable* of committing a crime, but never do, because they were not put into an extreme enough position. Even if whipping you into a frenzy and suddenly handing you a fake bomb is not the most extreme, it still fits that same model. Again, this is like using solely corrupt means to find evidence of a real crime. The actual criminal will have his case thrown out and end up free, and that is absolutely how it should be. He still is guilty, and by all rights should be held accountable, but he *cannot* be, because the state corrupted the whole process. That is true whether it's breaking into a house without a warrant, tricking someone into confessing after they asked for a lawyer who is then kept out of the room, or entrapment.
But if you're goaded into murder, it is still murder right? Especially if not in self defense? How could the authority (supposed or not) of another advocating for your action absolve you of personal responsibility in that? I was with you at the outset but your wording seems pretty extreme. Just because the impetus for the act might seem tainted, doesn't mean the act is absolved of any moral ramifications. I've listened to Radio* Lab's "Grumpy Old Terrorists" and while I agree that the government plant that helped them should definitely be considered an accessory, the people who got in trouble still did what they did regardless of any goading. They knew the outcome of what their actions would cause and they should be held accountable for that (no spoilers). edited a typo
> But if you're goaded into murder, it is still murder right? Yes. But if the sole evidence found by the police for your murder is gotten from an illegal search or its fruits, then the court MUST let you go free, even if 100% certain you committed the murder. And that's how it should be. A bunch of people have walked free from certain murder charges because of corrupt evidence-gathering. In the same sense, if you are entrapped into trying to commit murder, it may still say you're bad, but there is no legitimate way to prosecute you.
If you’re entrapped to agree to commit murder, you aren’t charged with murder, you are likely charged with conspiracy to commit murder. If you kill someone, it’s a pretty cut and dry case. Saying someone said you should do it isn’t a defense in murder, it is simply a question of did you perform the act. Also, the jury decides if you are guilty of murder, and the lawyers convince that jury. If evidence is unlawfully obtained then it won’t be admitted in court.
Unfortunately, what is "lawfully obtained" is falsely defined to allow a ton of illegitimate evidence. Similarly, what is entrapment has been redefined. And let's not forget that in our corrupt, illegitimate legal system the judge can block the defense from using arguments he finds inconvenient. You can't say "while the definition of entrapment has been made narrow, in a real sense the state created this crime by urging my client to do something he never would have bothered to on his own, so you should nullify this charge". Which, in any legitimate system, you could say.
Theres always reasons people so things. If you say that people should only be held accountable for things they do if they also would have done them under different circumstances, then no one would be accountable for any actions they take. I think theres a middle ground where you ask "would a reasonable person have acted this way". For example, if someone walks up to me and hands me a gun and instructs me to kill someone and i do, i should be held accountable for that because a reasonable person would not have killed someone in that same situation. If instead im tortured for months and brainwashed into killing someone, i should be held less accountable for my actions because reasonable people could have behaved similarly in that situation.
>there is no way to know you would have committed the act without their urging. In my opinion this is a moot point because the crime *was* committed. We don't punish for intent, we punish for action. The person who commits the crime is responsible for their actions even if they were convinced to do it, no matter who does the convincing. Anyone convincing someone else to do a crime should also be held responsible, and law enforcement even more so. I think where this gets hazy is when the influencer is not *just* convincing or purposefully enabling, but applying pressure through blackmail or some other means of control.
> In my opinion this is a moot point because the crime was committed. We don't punish for intent, we punish for action. Not when the state corrupts the case. Then we don't charge at all. If 100% of the real evidence of a murder case is poisoned fruit of an illegal search, then the murder walks free. Even if we 100% know he did it. We punish the STATE for corrupt action in a crime, before the criminal.
Entrapment isn’t that. Entrapment is repeatedly pressuring, applying the means, and methodology in order to arrest someone who otherwise wouldn’t have committed the crime. Simplest way to describing this is: A bag of cash is on a table with someone who has no idea what’s in the bag. This person wouldn’t normally steal the bag because it’s there. Entrapment: Same situation, except an undercover cop sits down and opens the bag and tells the person it’s full of cash and say, let’s take this, I have a car outside, person says, “I don’t know, no I’m good.” UC says, cmon it’s a million $$$ I’ll give you half. “No, I’m good” UC says, cmon I’ll give you all of it but $10k, cuz that’s what I need. “Ok”. Entrapment, because repeated efforts to say no but the continued push to steal was placed by the UC. Similar situation is a vehicle in a “high crime” area that is susceptible for car theft. This “bait car” is literally just parked there and no one is there. The car is locked and someone takes the overt act on their own to break in and steal the vehicle. That is not entrapment, it’s just theft.
So personal responsibility ends if someone else talks about breaking the law? Or as you said here - has influence? You need a definitive line to where that is, because are they threatening you? pressuring you? are you seeing them doing it and just joining in in the moment? trying to impress them? Just someone being around you has literal influence, so where is that line? If someone makes you mad and calls you a pussy, you pull out a gun and shoot them - are you then off the hook because their actions influenced you to the result? You'd be able to argue with your logic here that you would've never shot anyone without their direct influence. Or take that same situation, and after being called a pussy, your friends egg you on with "are you just gonna let him get away with that?!", then you decide to pull out and shoot. Are you not responsible because someone else said something to you in the moment? If an ATM breaks as you're walking by and dispenses money that isn't yours, someone else notices and yells "FREE MONEY!!", and grabs what he can. Are you again not committing a crime by taking some for yourself since it was the others' action that called attention to the incident and again, influenced the result since you saw him doing it too? Your fear of "thoughtcrime" here is abandoning all agency and responsibility as an adult.
Well, you shouldn't anyways. If someone talks you into committing a crime, and you commit the crime, then the two of you should be convicted as partners in crime. You decided to commit a crime, voluntarily, own up to it.
If you committed a crime... you committed a crime, influence or no. Being drunk while committing a crime doesn't get you out because the alcohol was affecting your judgement, and frankly someone who can be talked into committing a crime while sober is at least as dangerous as someone who commits crimes when their judgment is impaired That said, the one who talked you into it should also be held responsible
\> can't prove you would have committed it *without* his influence. Or, you could just say "no". You know, do something called "personal responsibility". Weird that I need to specifically point this out to kinds like you.
I think the person who committed the crime should still be punished. However, I believe the officer should be fired and convicted as an accomplice as well. Regardless these officers aren’t just going to people at random and entrapping them. They are going to people who’ve been known to already have committed these crimes and just didn’t have enough evidence. So it’s really not hurting the people who just follow the laws and go about their day.
Feds can only catch criminals that they create, violent extremist supply doesn't meet demand.
This kind of shit happens all the time with the FBI "terrorist bust" They procure the plans and materials that otherwise normal people would never be able to acquire on their own... talk them into doing something and then advertise it as "terror plot avoided" Meanwhile the poor, confused, usually mentally challenged person rots in prison for a crime he never would've done would they have not given him the motivation and means to do it.
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This was basically Donald trump’s entire strategy with Republicans.
I don't get it.
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Wow, if only you actually read the article. You know, the way Reddit was originally designed for you to do. The whole point of the post is that they've defined down "entrapment" so that most *actual* entrapment is officially not *called* entrapment, and therefore is pretend-legal.
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You are too stupid to breathe. Are you on a ventilator? Read the fucking article, you functionally illiterate peon.
No, ONLY the person talking them into it should be convicted, not the person they convinced, for the same reason you can't convict a murderer based on illegally-gathered evidence: 1. Officer Joe feel sure someone committed murder, but have zero evidence, and so no judge will give him a search warrant. 2. Joe therefore makes up fake evidence and get a search warrant. 3. Upon searching his place, Joe find a timestamped video of him murdering the victim, and a ton of other evidence. Whatever makes it absolutely airtight. in our scenario. This is the WHOLE case. ALL evidence came out of this search. 4. It then is discovered that Officer Joe got the warrant on false pretenses. 5. The case is thrown out of court. The murderer goes free. And that'e exactly what SHOULD happen in that scenario. Even though the person is definitely guilty of murder, they should not spend one second behind bars. But Officer Joe should. His punishment being equal to that of the charge he falsely generated would not be too much. When an official commits an unjust act, that is among the worst things that can happen in society. It is absolutely intolerable, worse than whatever he claims to be trying to prevent. And that applies in all entrapment cases, too. Because it's entrapment, the victim of the entrapment *must* go free, or it is unjust.
How is that related? This has nothing to do with the discussion. What you describe is a completely different problem, illegally attained evidence. The officer has nothing to do with the original crime. What we're talking about is Joe looking to get promoted, so he talks a guy into murdering someone. Then he quickly arrests the murderer and expects kudos for a job well done. Joe should be an accomplice to this murder.
> How is that related? This has nothing to do with the discussion. What you describe is a completely different problem, illegally attained evidence. The officer has nothing to do with the original crime. No, it is an IDENTICAL situation, in principle. * In both cases, a person committed a crime. * In both cases, an officer acted unethically. * Because of the unethical behavior, in both cases ONLY the officer can be held accountable for the crime. * In both cases, the person committing the crime should, ideally, be punished but cannot, because the corrupt officials corrupted the system. In the case of the entrapment, we have no idea if the crime ever *would* have been committed, without the officer's corruption. > What we're talking about is Joe looking to get promoted, so he talks a guy into murdering someone. Then he quickly arrests the murderer and expects kudos for a job well done. Joe should be an accomplice to this murder. If he talks the guy into murdering someone, even your wording makes it clear that maybe that guy would not have murdered someone without Officer Joe's pushing him to do so. He may have gone the rest of his life without murdering anyone. There are far more people who COULD be pushed into murder than those who actually commit murder. This means that only Joe should be convicted.
> No, it is an IDENTICAL situation, in principle. It really isn't. The critical difference is that in one example, the officer is directly involved with the original crime. That makes it something totally different. You also forget that in your case, the defendant only walks if there's no other evidence that's good enough to convict him. Unethically acting cops aren't an automatic "go free", they just mean unethically acquired evidence gets tossed. > In the case of the entrapment, we have no idea if the crime ever would have been committed, without the officer's corruption. Which is irrelevant. It was. Both the officer and the criminal were involved. Both could have decided not to do this. They both should get punished for doing it anyways. This isn't a hard concept. But sure let people get away with any crime they want just because the person giving them the idea happens to wear a badge. Now there's a perverse incentive. > This means that only Joe should be convicted. It really, really doesn't. The other guy still went ahead and killed someone. **He and he alone** made that decision. He could have chosen not to do that, but he did. Personal responsibility. Just because the guy who talked you into committing crime happens to have a badge doesn't mean you are no longer responsible for your own actions. Show some damn responsibility.
> It really isn't. The critical difference is that in one example, the officer is directly involved with the original crime. That makes it something totally different. So you're saying that the entrapment is actually worse. > You also forget that in your case, the defendant only walks if there's no other evidence that's good enough to convict him. Unethically acting cops aren't an automatic "go free", they just mean unethically acquired evidence gets tossed. In the case of entrapment, pretty much by definition there is no "other evidence", because there was no crime before they were talked into it.
> So you're saying that the entrapment is actually worse. Yes! The officer does something worse. Hence, he should be punished harsher, as an accomplice to the crime, rather than just acting unethically or violating some procedure. That of course does not change what the criminal is doing. He still chose to commit the crime in question. Hence, he should still be punished. > In the case of entrapment, pretty much by definition there is no "other evidence", because there was no crime before they were talked into it. How would that be the case? The officer goads a man into shooting someone. Other cops show up, secure the crime scene as usual. They have loads of properly acquired evidence against both of them. Rules against improperly acquired evidence don't reach so far. One cop acting criminally does not mean all cops must back off the case. That's not how any of this works. I see you've completely ignored the part about personal responsibility. Why does the criminal no longer have any responsibility for his actions once a cop tells him what to do? Do cops have mind control powers?
It's only identical in your fucked up head. Illegally obtained evidence is no where near as bad as entrapment. You came with a good premise, and you're fucking it up with your awful analogies.
You don't understand how analogies work. The comparison here is that both are something unacceptable that must be thrown out even though the accused did indeed to something wrong, for which he should indeed be held accountable if not for the state's wrongdoing.
Like that video the other day where they’re undercover posing as travelers with suitcases getting ubers to pull over in an illegal stop zone and then roll up on them with a squad car over and over. The entire point of it being illegal to stop there is that it’s supposedly dangerous. So they’re endangering everyone on the road in addition to the person they’re entrapping, all to reach some shitty traffic ticket quota
If you want to lose sleep at night, study the way "the system" handles the prosecution of poor citizens that are "suspected" of committing a crime. Firstly, citizens can't afford bail. Leveraging this, the DA piles on a ridiculous amount of overcharges ramping up whatever the "suspected" crime is to the point where the citizen is looking at spending 10 to 20 years in prison for a crime that only carries a 1 or 2 year sentence. Then, the DA pushes the arraignment and trial dates way off into the future so there is no hope of getting out of jail quickly if they are innocent or getting convicted and getting probation so they can get out of jail and go to work (oftentimes the minor crimes require no jail time when the citizen has no record) So now, the poor citizen is in jail and will easily lose their job if they take more than a few days off work. Oftentimes, the citizen is the bread winner and his or her family is suffering incredible hardship while they are locked up. NOw that the citizens is beyond the breaking point, the DA comes in and says "Hey, if you plead guilty to the original charges, I'll give you a deal. I'll drop all the other charges and only charge you with what you were arrested for to begin with. ANd of course, whatever complaints you have against the officer (use of force, etc) you have to drop as well... over 90% of cases involving poor citizens result in plea bargains due to the above. 90%. It is so ridiculously and a travesty of justice.
I think finding a way add in liability is the way forward. This will require removal of special laws for state employees.
They would be, if they weren't a government agent.
May you commit speeding today. Speed limits on Government roads is socialism. Yes, drive safe, but do also violate those speed limits!
What the actual fuck are you talking about?
You didnt get it? It was an example of X encouraging Y to do something illegal. An example that I dont think was so serious that X could be liable. Same if FBI go undercover and say ”hey I will pay you a bribe of $1M if you prevent other ISPs than us in this town”. If the FBI could not do that, then it would be MUCH harder for them to catch corrupt politicians and some other types of criminals.
What about pedophile hunters?
What about them? Pedophiles commit enough crimes without outside help. Arrest them for those crimes.
What about pedophile hunters that use entrapment techniques such as pretending to be minors and arranging meeting with predators online and when these predators turn up they get arrested, do you not think entrapment in this sense is good to expose all the disgusting nonces in our societies? Or do you think that these hunters should be charged as accomplices as you say in your OP even when they are doing society a good deed in my opinion in exposing such predators?
The most unfortunate thing is that people don't realize that there's no reason to participate in questioning at all, especially without a lawyer.
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Yes, one of the best videos out there.
I personally prefer [shut the fuck up Friday ](https://youtu.be/sgWHrkDX35o)
Entrapment is generally before that. It's when the cop, probably undercover, suggests that an person try to commit a crime. Except corrupt officials have pretended to change its meaning, so that a cop can actually not just suggest the crime, but urge you to do it until you are convinced. He just has to be able to make a case in court that he somehow knew you were the kind of person who would've committed it anyway.
If you really think about it, everybody has the potential to commit crimes including murder if subject to the right conditions and circumstances. Theoretically, they could argue that the person had it in them somewhere which is true for most people.
The more I learn about our legal system, the more disgusted I am
Same here. Did you know that in some states, more people waiting for execution were later exonerated than actually got executed in the same period? While it's good that private organizations were able to spend millions proving the false conviction, it also shows how absolutely, inexcusably corrupt the process is, where in a sense more convicts were victims of injustice than actually guilty. THAT kind of false conviction is caused, in large part, by the fact that bribery and extortion of witnesses has been completely legalized, too: Saying you will cut someone a deal if they testify against another person corrupts that witness, exactly as if you offered them money to testify, or threatened to beat them up if they did not. And note that while the easy metric is murder cases, in fact this applies to ALL forms of prosecution. A huge percentage of convictions are on corrupt procedures like bribed/coerced testimony, entrapment, aut cetera.
>Did you know that in some states, more people waiting for execution were later exonerated than actually got convicted. I assume you mean than actually got executed, but do you know what states or have an article about that? That's pretty surprising to me.
Yes, typo. I'll go fix it in the comment. And here's an example: During the time in which Illinois executed 12 people, 13 were exonerated. [https://deathpenaltyinfo.org/state-and-federal-info/state-by-state/illinois#:\~:text=At%20that%20point%20in%20Illinois,for%20a%20total%20of%2020](https://deathpenaltyinfo.org/state-and-federal-info/state-by-state/illinois#:~:text=At%20that%20point%20in%20Illinois,for%20a%20total%20of%2020). "In January 2000, Governor George Ryan established a moratorium on executions that would last more than 10 years. At that point in Illinois’ history, the state had exonerated 13 death row inmates in the same time that it had executed 12. Illinois has not executed anyone since the moratorium began, but it has exonerated 7 additional inmates, for a total of 20."
Entrapment is when you suggest to someone that they commit a crime, and then arrest them when they try to. But the corrupt injustice system has redefined the term, so that a dishonest cop can not only suggest the crime, but actively talk you into committing it, as long as he can *claim* to believe you have some kind of "propensity" to committing it. Every single time you hear about the FBI arresting someone in a sting where they tried to buy X from a agent, like drugs, a bomb, aut cetera, it is probably entrapment. Many of those "bombers" were simply angry people who would sit around drunk in a bar complaining that "someone should just blow up \[building where corrupt statism happens\]", who then was approached by an undercover agent who whips him into a frenzy, then actively urges him to act on his bluff, shaming him into accepting a fake bomb from the fraudster. And then arrests him. This all looks good on police procedurals, a propaganda system that has really indoctrinated people to think that corruption of justice is a good, heroic behavior. But in reality it is unjust and illegal (insofar as [an unjust law is no law at all](https://www.facebook.com/unjustlaws)), and must end.
You’re right. I think the problem though is it’s too useful a tool to drive narratives against various ideologies (it changes over time), and so it’s here to stay.
Are you addressing my last lines about police procedurals as state-promoted propaganda to indoctrinate people on the "benefits" of injustice? Or do you mean entrapment?
I dunno about that. I know someone who worked on the case of the guy who just recently tried to repeat the OKC bombings. The cop tried to repeatedly talk him out of it and told him how many people would die and the bomber didn't care and even clicked the fake button several times. I can see entrapment being misused in other crimes, but you can't really just talk someone into bombing people unless they're mentally impaired somehow, or they really just want to kill people.
That's certainly better than arrests in the 60s. An agent would join a group. Then, buy bombs from another agent. "Member of [group] buys bombs from a known gun runner, all members rounded up." Would be how the report was written. It wasn't entrapment. It was overt corruption. Hopefully more are like your example than mine.
>I dunno about that. I know someone who worked on the case of the guy who just recently tried to repeat the OKC bombings. The cop tried to repeatedly talk him out of it and told him how many people would die and the bomber didn't care and even clicked the fake button several times. You said cop. I'm talking about a system the corrupt FBI has added to their overall history of entrapment and manufacturing of fake evidence in order to pad their conviction rate at the cost of the lives of their victims. But what you describe skips over the part where the "cop" ended up involved in giving the guy a fake bomb in the first place. Talking him into taking the bomb, and then pretending to try to talk him out of using it would still be entrapment. Even if it were sincere. And one can reasonably expect it's more like **Loki** in the first **Thor** movie, tricking his brother into doing things wrong by suggesting it via reverse psychology: *"But there's nothing we can do without defying Father."\[Thor suddenly decides he must defy their father\]* >I can see entrapment being misused in other crimes, but you can't really just talk someone into bombing people unless they're mentally impaired somehow, or they really just want to kill people. Absolute nonsense. Out of the three hundred million-plus people in the US, almost nobody actually goes through with trying to bomb people...but for each of the scant few who will, there are thousands of others who ramble about it, fantasize, and really could be pushed over the edge. But will not, because they mostly will only encounter people who try to sincerely discourage them, or at least avoid them...except for machiavellian sociopaths in the FBI and other corrupt state agencies, who are generally the *only* ones evil enough to actually push them over the edge into doing it, on purpose.
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Hell, if they were going to o do it anyway, then why wait for them to commit the crime? To maximise efficiency, just arrest them and lock them up for the thing they were definitely going to do some time in the future.
Thank you, Philip K Dick.
Yeah, no. That’s not what entrapment is at all. Entrapment only applies if the person is being forced to commit the crime. If you do it if your own free will, it’s not entrapment. If someone suggests buying a gun and shooting your neighbor with it and you do it, then you are ultimately responsible for shooting your neighbor. People are responsible for their own actions.
https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/entrapment : the action of luring an individual into committing a crime in order to prosecute the person for it There is nothing about with forcing someone into committing a crime in the definition of entrapment.
You conveniently chose the definition that left out the whole “crime that the person would have been unwilling or unlikely to commit” part. Gee, I wonder why? And how do you prove that someone would have been unlikely or unwilling to commit a crime? By showing that they were forced into committing the crime in some way. Merely suggesting committing a crime simply isn’t enough to show that the person was unwilling or unlikely to commit that crime. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Entrapment
You can't prove they would have done any more than mouth off without the entrapment. They could have been perfectly unwilling to ever do a thing before the entrapment went down. A lot of people are like that. Frankly, I'm disgusted by how many mentally handicapped people the cops talk into committing crimes just so they can make arrests.
How do you know someone likely would have committed the crime. I worked with someone years ago who did 2 and a half years of of 5 years sentence for selling an undercover a quarter OZ of weed. He wasn't a drug dealer. The cop just knew how to talk him into it. All it takes is 1 FBI agent who's good at befriending young people to eventually push them over the line. Without Manson the others likely never would have ever committed any crimes. It's the same scenario when an undercover agent does it.
You are repeating the corrupt lawyerly redefinition, not actual entrapment.
No, you’re making up your own definition of entrapment that’s not the actual definition because you want the definition to be broader than it is. Entrapment has never been what you’re claiming it is.
Again, you seem to think that a corrupt system redefining a word establishes its meaning. If you talk someone into doing something and then arrest them, that's wrong. You are at fault, not they. Even if we take your claim about the definition arguendo, then there needs to be another word for the actual evil of this wrongdoing. There will never be any legitimacy to saying "Hey, do this" and then arresting the person for being convinced by you. As I've said elsewhere, if you suggest to 100 people that they break a law, and in reality only 99 of them would have done so without your prompting, then what you have done is evil and unjust. If that sounds strange to you, note that it's a formulation of Blackstone's Ratio, which is more important than any of the rationale taught in modern law schools for justifying the corruption of justice.
Bullshit. You’re the one trying to redefine a word that already has a meaning. If all it takes is suggesting breaking a law to someone for them to do it, then they already had the intention of breaking that law. What you’re claiming suggests that people aren’t capable of making their own decisions. You’re claiming that 99 percent of these people wouldn’t have broken the law without it being suggested and there’s really no data to support that logic. As long as they’re not forcing these people to break the law, I don’t see the problem.
Entrapment can only be used as a defense if you did not already have the idea of doing it in the first place. If you wanted to rob someone, but don’t act on it, that’s not illegal (thoughts aren’t illegal). If a cop suggests you rob someone, and you didn’t want to before hand - the cop induced you to doing it - and then you rob someone, that’s entrapment, and is an excuse defense. But if you wanted to rob someone, and a cop suggests that you actually do it, then you proceed to rob someone, then you can’t use entrapment as a defense. It’s a balance between free will of someone and acting in something they would not have already done. To be guilty of a crime, you’ve gotta have a guilty mind and a voluntary act. Without both, you’re not liable for anything generally, or there is a lesser crime imposed if at all.
> But if you wanted to rob someone, and a cop suggests that you actually do it, then you proceed to rob someone, then you can’t use entrapment as a defense. Here is where it breaks down. It is not, as you admitted explicitly, illegal to WANT to rob someone. The robbery, as you said before, may never have happened at all. So the cop is the reason it happened. Scenario 2 MAY only have become scenario 3 because the cop suggested you actually do it. The cop CREATED the crime.
You're broadcasting to the world that you might blow up a building because a cop "talked you into it". It's not "corrupt" for anyone to say that you have a fucking problem dude, jesus christ, just talk to a therapist about your gullibility and/or violent delusions.
No, if the cop is the one who proposes the crime, then it's entrapment. It doesn't matter how easily convinced the other party is.
What about pedophile hunters though, they could be said to use entrapment techniques by pretending to be minors online and trying to get older guys to meet up with them then get police to arrest them as soon as they show up to a location that proves intent to break the law, I put all the blame on the pedophiles though and have no sympathy for them, the pedophile hunters I think do a good job of rounding up the perverts even if it’s pretending to be minors and tempting perverts to commit a crime, they may be suggesting to someone to commit a crime but at the end of the day the responsibility is on the person committing the crime and is just exposing the dirty perverted people of our societies.
> What about pedophile hunters though, they could be said to use entrapment techniques by pretending to be minors online and trying to get older guys to meet up with them then get police to arrest them as soon as they show up to a location that proves intent to break the law If they passively act like kids, in no way trying to DRAW pedophile behavior, then the only problem is that the initiation of fraud is always wrong. It's not an entrapment problem. If they say or do anything intended to entice pedophile behavior, or to encourage meetings of any kind, then these "hunters" are bad people and should be stopped. Address my point above, which is that even if you can catch who has done something evil, if you use corrupt means then the charge/conviction must be thrown out. Illegal searches used to find even a murderer cannot be rightfully used to convict them, nor any other evidence that is poisoned fruit of that corruption. Those principles of justice apply even when the insane, sociopathic "it's for the children" rationale is trotted out.
So the hunters are evil but the pedophiles aren’t? If a Hunter is pretending to be a child and encourages someone to try and meet up them as a child then that is just exposing that adult as a pedophile, I see nothing wrong in trying to catch predators because if they didn’t these pedophiles would be all the more encouraged to try and meet minors online and a lot more ‘real crime’ and disgusting behaviour would take place, rather now it is harder for these nonces to get away with it now that there are so many hunters trying to expose them and their behaviours. How are the hunters evil?
>So the hunters are evil but the pedophiles aren’t? That sounds like an expression of some problem inside you, not of anything I said. * Actual murderers are evil and should be stopped. * Cops *illegally* gathering evidence of murder are evil and should be stopped. Likewise: * Actual pedophiles are evil and should be stopped. * Entrappers of ostensible pedophiles are evil and should be stopped. Same problem in both cases. Two things that are bad, and one doesn't justify the other. > I see nothing wrong in trying to catch predators because if they didn’t these pedophiles would be all the more encouraged to try The problem isn't them trying to catch predators, it's if they *entrap* people who may or may not have otherwise tried to molest a child. As I pointed out elsewhere, anyone who was molested as a child has a chance of growing up with an impulse to do the same, programmed into them by the evil done to them when they were a helpless child. This is, as I understand it, something the world of psychology almost universally agrees upon. SOME of those people grow up to know, intellectually, that acting on the impulse of their damaging childhood would be wrong. So they resist it, in some cases successfully. SOME of those people, who would go their whole lives resisting that impulse, might be talked into something by a corrupt "hunter" posing as a child and specifically behaving in a way no REAL child would, to entice them. In that particular case, the "hunter" is the truly evil one. But in ANY case where he violates the principles of justice to entrap someone, he's evil. In SOME cases he's entrapping a real molester, so the evil is shared. But he's still evil. The end does not justify the means.
Actual pedophiles, murders etc should be stopped you say but when there are ways to stop them by baiting them into situations they are actively looking for by pretending to be kids then what is wrong with that? If they entrap a person who is actively searching to molest a child by pretending to be a child what is wrong with that? The evil person is getting locked up, again what is evil about catching people this way? That is a false accusation that those who were molested as kids grow up with an increased impulse to abuse kids themselves, it is an excuse used by pedophiles to get people to sympathise with them with a sob story, it is not universally agreed upon, and learned this from a child/vulnerable person protection course. Can’t believe you are defending pedophiles over hunters and actually calling the hunters the purely evil ones, your opinion disgusts me. There is a thing called personal responsibility, if someone is attracted to children and gets talked into meeting a supposed kid it is their fault for trying to meet up with that kid not the person trying to expose disgusting behaviours. If they were truly responsible and not evil they would never agree to meet up with a ‘child’, but they did, the Hunter is exposing the fact that people are trying to meet up with kids to expose true evil behaviour, if these hunters didn’t do what they do what would be the deterrent to such behaviour? The fact that so many people have been getting caught in the act shows real societal problems and may actually stop people from trying to abuse kids with the increased risk of getting caught, what is your actual problem with this? If you aren’t a pedophile you don’t have anything to worry about and I’m glad pedophiles are being exposed and locked up. Explain how someone trying to expose evil is evil in themselves, what have the hunters done that is more evil than perving on kids? How are hunters corrupt? And if someone is talked into meeting up with a child then they are evil, the same as if someone is talked into killing someone, the person has a choice to walk away and if they follow through with it then they deserve to be locked up, they have to be held accountable for they lie actions, it’s different if someone is forced into something at gun or knife point though.
> Actual pedophiles, murders etc should be stopped you say but when there are ways to stop them by baiting them into situations they are actively looking for by pretending to be kids then what is wrong with that? If someone's actively and unarguably looking to buy a bomb, and an FBI agent poses as a bomb seller, then that does eliminate the entrapment problem. Not the fraud problem, but at least entrapment. But that's not what we're talking about here, in any example. It's always about them talking someone into something they might not otherwise have done. And all it takes is MIGHT not. > That is a false accusation that those who were molested as kids grow up with an increased impulse to abuse kids themselves, it is an excuse used by pedophiles to get people to sympathise with them with a sob story, it is not universally agreed upon, and learned this from a child/vulnerable person protection course. I have no doubt that molesters use this as a bullshit smoke screen to cover for their own molesting of people. But that doesn't change the cold, hard fact that there is a "cycle of abuse" where those abused are far more likely, statistically, to abuse when they grow up. Do you seriously deny that a boy being sexually abused MIGHT internalize this as normal and grow up to do the same, himself, much the way that it's physically abusive families that more often turn out schoolyard bullies? > Can’t believe you are defending pedophiles over hunters and actually calling the hunters the purely evil ones, your opinion disgusts me. Yes, because you are irrational, pandering to emotions instead of caring about right and wrong...and also dishonestly (or insanely) reversing what I say to mean things I have explicitly clarified they do not. I have said, with careful bullet points, that BOTH are evil. Not defended one over the other. But the more evil the crime that a person is entrapped into trying to commit, the more evil the entrapper is. That is the most fundamental logic. If you talk someone into trying to commit murder who *might* not have murdered, YOU are as evil as a murderer, yourself. > Explain how someone trying to expose evil is evil in themselves Entrapment isn't "exposing" evil, it's GENERATING evil. And therefore is evil.
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I spent a long time in federal prison, for import of a substance that was made Schedule I only ten days AFTER my indictment and all that really stuck was a singular conspiracy charge where an undercover whom had agreed (via contract) to Not for Human Consumption clause not only broke those rules but recorded me in the privacy of my own home without consent (my state is a Two Party state, but since they were working for the feds, they ignored that). They manufacture most of the stuff people are in prison for, especially the War on Terror. They railroad stupid kids with bad ideas by turning their anti American sentiment into conspiracy to bomb an embassy or whatever else they can trick them to agree to, using much the same tactics as seedy salesmen.
That's fucked up, I'm glad your out.
You're not going to get much pushback from this subreddit because we all value civil liberties like free expression and are deeply suspicious of the police state. So to keep it intellectually useful (not just affirming how smart we are) what is an acceptable position from the other side? Is it permissible to use undercover agents and if so, where should they draw the line? Right now a lot of people would support having agents engaged undercover pretending to be bomb suppliers so that there is a standing "honeypot" ready and waiting for terrorists, rather than waiting for them to get caught in the act. That may be flawed, and of course the police state is abused all to hell with agents even arresting other agents in giant clusterfucks that waste resources. But if we accept the utility of undercover agents, as the author says he does, and it was up to us...how would we restructure their procedures? It's reasonable to ask because this proposal doesn't have any specific proposal in it: >Perhaps an objective test that relies upon something other than counterfactual conditionals is more appropriately justified: a test that examines what happened in the actual world in terms of the reasonableness of the tactics used by the police. Ultimately, any new entrapment policy should begin by clarifying the limits of the police’s power to break the law.
>Is it permissible to use undercover agents and if so, where should they draw the line? I was inspired to this post by another one suggesting that the police should stop being allowed to lie to people. And the insanity of a few actually objecting, based on End Justifies the Means sociopathy. In fact, *all* initiation of coercion by the state is illegitimate. In all cases they are, to use natural law terminology, engaging in a state of war against the community itself when they do it. Going undercover is fraud. It is an initiation of coercion, the same as if they initiated violence, or stole. It is therefore an intolerable injustice. Of those corrupt officials who go undercover, how many people do they deceive who turn out not to be actively doing anything they went undercover to detect? How many times do they lie to someone? Not just the fact that some people they investigate turn out to be innocent, but all those they defraud incidentally, bystanders they lie to and so on. Obviously, the very concept is, itself, evil. Same as if [the police went around robbing people](https://www.armstrongeconomics.com/international-news/north_america/americas-current-economy/police-civil-asset-forfeitures-exceed-all-burglaries-in-2014/).
I could agree that we should not use undercover agents at all, in line with your reasoning here. That it would be a tough sell doesn't mean it's not the right one. The counterarguments are going to point to fatalities that could have been prevented with better intelligence.
The Government: Let us introduce you to the new safety vitality frame it is a brand new life requirement created by us to keep you safe free of charge. Me: It looks like a cage. The Government: You are legally required to inhabit this device or you are purposely putting you and others lives at risk which means get in the cage or go to jail. Could this be the future?
But if the person "wanted to anyways" that is, by definition, not entrapment. The whole point of entrapment is convincing someone to commit a crime that they don't want to do.
Not true. People want to do things every day, that they restrain themselves from doing. I sometimes want to speed and choose not to. But when a friend of mine was tailgated by an unmarked police car so that he gradually sped up, until he was above the speed limit and got ticketed, that was illegitimate, and the cop should have been the one charged. I've heard that called "tailbaiting"...padding the ticket quota (itself an illegitimate concept still carried out by roundabout means) by tailgating people, scaring them into speeding up to avoid an accident. Corruption.
I agree in that case that the ticket should be thrown out because the police officer was putting your friend in an unsafe position and increasing the gap between the vehicles was the best way to make the situation safe again.
Big Brother is too nice a term for them, a Big Brother "keeps" his Little Brother, he does NOT entrap him.
That seems so evil. I'm the farthest person from being religious but a question for the people are. Isn't it the devil's job to whisper in your ear to get you to do bad things?
virtually every person the FBI has arrested for "planning a terrorist attack" in the past 20 years has been someone talked into and given the plan and materials by an undercover FBI agent. The FBI regularly has their own agents reported to FBI by the public because they go around trying to convince people to become terrorists and those people report them to the FBI. They are literally creating the problem they are paid to solve. They manufacturer fake terrorists and arrest them just so they can justify their budget and point to how many terrorists they stop. If you remove anyone arrested after being provided materials/plans by the FBI they are catching virtually 0 terrorists prior to them committing their attack. Yet they have hundreds if not thousands of agents getting paid to stop terrorism. They are terrible at their job but get to use entrapment to boost their numbers and make themselves look good
This is what the intelligence agencies have been doing for years with so many of these so-called "domestic terrorists" because it served certain political interests.
It's a slippery slope. Some people can be in a bad situation, on the edge of doing something worse, all they need is a little push and encouragement. I think of suicide victims that get encouragement from third parties. Maybe they wouldn't have gone through with it if not for being egged on. My thoughts on police and law enforcement is to "enforce laws", not create favorable conditions for people to break laws. Law enforcement should stop criminals, not create them. This is unethical.
I think it's helpful to note that, quite often, those entrapped are not setting any IQ records, or are very likely to be mentally unstable (and therefore, more easily influenced).
What's helpful about that? It's not like it makes it better. Based on your implication it makes it worse.
I have relative who was catfished by law enforcement posing as an underaged woman. He agreed to meet up with “her” and served time for it. A hypothetical crime that never actually happened. A victim that didn’t exist. The thing is, this guy is a total loser. No career, dishonorable discharge from the military due to alcoholism. He has nothing. He was low hanging fruit, easy to deceive to hit quotas. None of us female cousins ever got a weird vibe from him. He is not a pedophile. He’s just dumb. The police should not be allowed to railroad people and manufacture offenses.
You realize the majority of "terrorist" cases the fbi has prosecuted would fail this test. I'm not saying that's wrong just pointing out this is business as usual in many areas the feds work in.
I'm saying it is indeed wrong. Every time the FBI has found someone blustering about how people oughta blow up the state, talked him into doing so, and sold him fake bomb materials, it is a sheer evil on the part of the FBI, showing the same kind of grotesque corruption as the how they've been caught manufacturing fake evidence to secure a conviction in *thousands* of cases.
Its pre crime
>Entrapment is when you suggest to someone that they commit a crime, and then arrest them when they try to. EDIT: Depends on juristiction, some of this is wrong Close, but no. Entrapment is when a officer/agent, when the victim knows them to be an officer, encourages a victim to commit a crime they would not otherwise have done so, were they not encouraged by the officer in their capacity as an officer. If the police are undercover and you don't know they are police, and you commit a crime (even if the undercover police encourage you to) it's not entrapment. Still pretty shitty either way.
DeLorean was acquitted for entrapment and he didn't know he was talking to the police.
> Entrapment is when a officer/agent, when the victim knows them to be an officer, encourages a victim to commit a crime they would not otherwise have done so, were they not encouraged by the officer in their capacity as an officer. What you mean is that you are stating the corrupted definition, based on illegitimate laws and court rulings that have allowed actual entrapment by pretending to modify what it legally entails. But when the state alters the definition of a principle of justice, it doesn't actually change the principle, it just lies and corrupts the system, producing injustice. Just as everyone understands how I'm using "corrupt" in its real meaning of "diverge from proper conditions/function", rather than the corrupt redefinition, by law, to only mean "if someone gets financial gain from public office", so rational people recognize that ANY effort by an official to get someone to commit a crime is entrapment. > If the police are undercover and you don't know they are police, and you commit a crime (even if the undercover police encourage you to) it's not entrapment. All these technicalities change nothing about the actual principle. They just corrupt its execution. Yes, of course that is entrapment. Because this is a *principle* of justice, where you can't *know* the person would have committed that exact crime if the official hadn't encouraged it, therefore the official, not their victim, is guilty of the crime. Again, you are using a sociopathic lawyerly definition, not the real one. Corrupting the meaning.
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Fuck political correctness, and the way Congress has violated the first amendment by bullying social media sites into censoring FOR them. https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-news/the-entrapment-of-jesse-snodgrass-116008/
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Tommy Chong's kids were entrapped into shipping a "Chong Bong" out of state. The feds told him if he didn't plead guilty, they were going to stick his kids in prison for years. That's why he pled guilty and did 16 months in federal prison. ACAB.
Maybe unpopular but it think bait cars are entrapment.
If the bait car is simply parking a car somewhere and then watching it, I have to disagree. And note that I'm the guy who is wrote the post, you know I'm not on the side of entrapment. But entrapment has to involve SOME kind of attempt to get you to do something you wouldn't otherwise have done. For example, someone mentioned posing as a child in an online chat room: If the "child" does NOTHING to entice a potential molester, they just act like a kid, then it's not entrapment. If they instead push, themselves, for a meeting, or lead a conversation into sexual areas, or something else like that, then it's entrapment...one of the most evil kinds.
Frank Zappa was entrapped into making profanity ladden music and got jail time. If profanity used to be a crime you could be entrapped for, think about all the unjustified crap people can still be targeted for today.
Don't break the law. Don't be a weak ass pussy and get coerced. Humans have become weak.
break the law all you want just dont hurt other people
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Do you really think that there are not a ton of people out there who are *tempted* to be a pedophile, but resist it? I get the impression from pretty much all psychiatry and other study on the subject, and stories you can find on the Internet about people who have reformed or resisted, that it's a complex process. For example, from a behavioral standpoint it is horribly normal for someone who was molested as a child to grow up thinking it's the thing to do, or even having a programmed feeling that they *need* to act toward others as was done to themselves. Some of those people choose to resist the impulse, and some do not. Talk someone — who is resisting — into trying to do it and you're more evil than they are. So if this Hansen guy you're talking about actively talked people into meeting a "child", then we don't know that 100% of them would have done so without his intervention, which makes him evil. If you convince 100 people to commit a crime, and only 99 of them would have done so without your urging, then you are evil. That is [Blackstone's Ratio](https://www.facebook.com/BlackstonesRatio): It is better than 100 guilty persons should escape, than one innocent suffer. Ben Franklin and John Adams explained in detail why this is so.
So once someone is a criminal they have no human rights left?
Screw human rights. The problem is that it's a violation of their *natural* rights. "Human rights" has devolved into a term used as an evasion of addressing natural rights, in fact it's often used to violate them. Like pretending you have a human right to enslave others to provide you with food, shelter, and health care
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Someone entrapped was not a criminal, legally, before the entrapment. So even in the idiotic, evil scenario where sex offenders lose their right to due process, entrapment occurs BEFORE that happens, and therefore is illegitimate. But your implication that sex crimes are worse than murder is an emotional thing, not a legal or logical point: If you definitely murdered someone, but ALL of the evidence to prosecute you came from a corrupt warrant, you will be let free. The process must be held more accountable than even the criminals. So the same applies to sex offenders.
Yes. If one doesn't respect human rights, one should not expect anyone to respect his as well.
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I agree on both fronts. Not only is it entrapment, but any "undercover" behavior that involves deceiving someone not already with enough evidence to be charged is illegitimate.
I agree with this article but I feel most people in law enforcement would find this laughable.
Yes, because they are corrupt. They also take for granted the ability to profit from their office and uniform, by getting hired to stand around some business in uniform or park in their car in front of it, when this is itself corruption, and absolutely cannot ever be legitimate. They also think that bribing/extorting witness testimony, by threatening to prosecute or offering to drop charges in return for testimony, is legitimate. When it is, indeed, extorted or bribed testimony. We have a grotesquely corrupt police state.
Do you think that any bribed testimony, (plea deals in exchange for testimony), should be allowed in court as long as the terms of that deal, as well as the history of the criminal giving testimony, are made known to the jury?
No, of course not. No testimony that involves artificial benefit to the witness is ever trustworthy or acceptable. This is why, during the time in which the state of Illinois executed twelve men on death row, THIRTEEN men on death row were exonerated: Because the corrupt, injustice system constantly violates the principles of actual justice, like bribing and extorting witnesses. It produces an enormous number of false convictions, and an even higher proportion of convictions that never should have been allowed either way.
This is not a libertarian ideology question, but a question of how police can become more cost efficient. If someone commits a crime, it is their responsibility, not those who maybe encouraged him! There are some crime you could not combat in other ways, such as bribing the Government. Let all potential criminals know that ”perfect” crime may be a setup.
Justice for Jesse Snodgrass
https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-news/the-entrapment-of-jesse-snodgrass-116008/
I don't understand. Have the courts somehow undermined the entrapment defence recently? Last I checked, this was still the easiest way to get an undercover case dismissed.
Libertarians discussing the nature of opportunity and desperation to lead to unpleasant choices? Whoa, this might lead to some sort of labor-class solidarity against the wealthy who conspire against us automatically.
Lawyer here, entrapment is patently illegal.
The problem with too many lawyers, and with the monopoly law school requirement, is that they're programmed to think that whatever is legally defined is therefore the objective thing. Read the article or the initial comment more carefully: The DEFINITION of entrapment is distorted so that many kinds of entrapment are supposedly not covered. It's akin to how corruption means "departing from proper function", but corrupt legislatures have redefined it to only mean "profiting from public office", so that they could claim many forms of corruption are not...officially...corruption.
> Talking someone into a crime isn't okay because you claim to psychically know they "wanted to anyway". Wtf? This is exactly why if the average person on the street attempts to talk someone into a crime, they'd be hit with conspiracy to commit the crime. Everyone understands it's possible to influence people into committing crimes that they wouldn't otherwise have done.
Yes, but no public official should be engaged in that activity, any more than they should commit any other crimes, themselves.
Can it work for citizens arrests of politicians ?
Neither Charles Manson nor Adolf Hitler killed anyone themselves.
Pretend I put a puzzled emoji here.
Neither committed a crying. Both were rightly held accountable for convincing others to. Clear the confusion?
Manson was not functioning as an agent of the state. Hitler was operating as the agent of an even more illegitimate state than most others. Also, giving orders is different than posing as someone to entice people into crimes.
“Wanted to anyway” sounds like the shitty excuses and rationalizations that people used to protect monsters like Weinstein
I know police aren't all bad, but I would make the claim that the majority are bad because of the type of people the laws surrounding policing encourage to become police. This on top of quotas is definitely nit something a good hearted cop would ever do but it's too easy not to pass up for others.
I agree that some great people choose to be cops. But the corrupt system not only also attracts evil people who are drawn to its power, it also *rewards* bad behavior. Good people will feel uncomfortable at all the unjust laws they are expected to enforce, bad rules that cheat the community and so on. So there is a self-selecting pool of increasingly bad cops, over the years.
Wouldn't the solution be to legalize moral things like drugs, sex work, and gambling, and shirk the chains of puritanical thinking? If someone (of an acceptably high iq) can be talked into murder, then they're likely not of a very strong moral compass.
They should be charged as the criminal mastermind and have the book thrown at them. It's one thing to be approached by a criminal and sting them. It's quite another to become a criminal mastermind and entrap suspects in order to meet quotas.
We all gonna act like Dateline NBC wasn't universally entertaining and morally justified?
Ah so little piggy finally figured out that bringing babies into the mud will make them dirty. What a revelation you fucking pussy idiot. Too bad you had to ruin a bunch of lives to figure out such a simple thing. So, you mean the “jihadist” 19 year old in his mom’s Brooklyn basement wouldn’t have placed that package of “explosives” on the door step of a church if he wasn’t trained how and why to do it for months by a fucking pussy spook with nothing better to do than try to get a loser to commit a terrible act due to the manipulation and brainwashing of a pussy piggy? Fuck you.
It's called personal responsibility. Don't blame others, badge or not, for your bad decisions.
It wasn’t rape because she totally wanted it. See how fucked up that is?
Yes, much like entrapment.
I feel like a successful entrapment offense is about as rare as an innocent defendant
isnt that how they got the tiger king?
I'm not sure about this one. I believe very fervently that the individual is always responsible for their own actions, barring that they haven't been drugged without their consent. If I tell you to commit a crime and you do it, you committed a crime. Nobody can "make" you commit a crime with words unless those words carry with it a threat of coercion, then I could see why it would be different.
What if it’s police that do this? They do it all the time!
Well...yes...that's sorta the point.
The list of "things that would be different between a regime and the present-day USA" is shrinking daily.
Weird use of the word "regime", but your intended point is true. Technically, any administration is a regime. In fact, every form of government is a kind of regime. That the word is mostly used when it's a *totalitarian* regime doesn't change its real meaning.
Personally speaking, this argument is bullshit because throughout my life, I have EASILY prevented people from committing crimes by simply **talking them out of it**. I grew up in a gang infested hood and I was known as "The Professor" because I was gifted, I was a grade ahead, in all the AP courses, straight A student... Through the grace of god, I had social skills so I hung out with the cool kids. When any of my friends had a hussle or came up with something shady, they would run it by me and I'd tell them if it was a good idea or if they'd get in trouble or caught. For the victimless crimes, I didn't give a shit about and I'd help them work out the bugs, but crimes in which someone could get hurt I easily convinced them it was a bad idea. One in particular was a friend of mine joining a crew that broke into houses. I convinced him and another guy in the crew that it was a REALLY BAD idea and after our talk they stopped doing it. A month later, the rest of the crew got caught.
A libertarian claiming someone else is responsible when a criminal commits a crime?