Entrapment |
An undercover officer can legally initiate crime. That is, the narc can be the person pushing the drugs, or actively seeking a source for buying them. (“Hey man, you know where I can get some good weed? Can you hook me up?”) Most people imagine that when an undercover law enforcement officer instigates a crime, that’s entrapment. Unfortunately, “entrapment” is one of those words that has a much narrower definition in a court of law than in common speech. To argue at trial that a criminal defendant was entrapped into committing a crime, the defense attorney has to get permission from the judge in advance. She has to show that the defendant (1) had no inclination or tendency to commit the crime, and (2) that the law enforcement agent(s) exerted considerable psychological pressure to get the defendant to break the law. Unfortunately, when the defendant has prior convictions or even arrests, the prosecutor often successfully argues that the defendant has demonstrated criminal tendencies. Moreover, it’s hard to show that the defendant was urged so intensely that he eventually caved in and agreed to commit the crime. For example, in the preceding story, Narc in the Park, Jamal wouldn’t be successful in arguing that the undercover officer overwhelmed him into buying the marijuana. By contrast, consider the following two cases which show how much evidence is required to prove entrapment. Entrapment Example 1: Postal inspectors, pretending to be a variety of different sellers of pornography, spent over two years persuading a man to send away for obscene photos. The court ruled that this was entrapment. Entrapment Example 2: An informant in a drug treatment program, after much pleading and insistence that he was truly suffering because the treatment wasn’t working for him, eventually convinced a fellow patient to get drugs for him. The court ruled that this was entrapment.1 |
