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Entrapment

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The Wrath

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I head about a website on the radio that I decided to check out, called www.pervertedjustice.com. The people who run this site go into chatrooms and pretend to be young children of either sex, wait for people to contact them and then, frequently, end up engaged in conversations with pedophiles. They post all the conversations on the website...some of them are extremely disturbing. What they do is legal and has been validated by numerous courts. They also cooperate with law enforcement. A number of the pedophiles have been arrested and convicted on a number of different charges.

My question is this: is this an ethical practice? Technically, I believe that this would qualify as entrapment, which I am generally against. However, this is not drugs or prostitution we are dealing with, two other issues for which cops frequently use entrapment. My personal view is that the goals of this website are completely moral and just. Some of the people who have been caught as a result were previous offenders. Others may not have engaged in pedophilia before, but I believe these actions are justified if it will help to remove the threat to innocent children that is posed by these wackos.

Unfortunately, most of the people who are arrested end up pleading to a lesser charge and getting off with probation or something. But the website does, nonetheless, increase awareness in the communities where these people live. They post pictures and contact info on these guys, whenever they're available. If you have the time, I urge you to read some of the conversations...particularly, go to the top few on the "most slimy" list. Some of the things you will read are truly chilling.

EDIT:

Okay, apparently it isn't entrapment, because they never initiate contact. But it's still the same principle.

Edited by Moose
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BTW: This group were featured on a very recent Dateline (NBC?) show. The producers took a house in Fairfax Co., VA. The folk from the "PervertedJustice" group posed as kids in chat rooms. In course of these conversations, they invited these adults to the Fairfax house, saying their parents would be away. There was no kid involved. In each "successful" case, the adult ended up coming in to the house and waiting in the kitchen. The TV reporter would then emerge and confront the person. It was all on camera. One of the guys stripped in the garage and came in naked into the kitchen (that's what the fake kid had suggested in the chat session). There was a doctor, a high-school teacher, a rabbi and an unemployed guy.

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My question is this: is this an ethical practice? Technically, I believe that this would qualify as entrapment, which I am generally against.

The majority of courts follow what I think they call the "subjective" test. In order to succeed with an entrapment defense under the subjective test, the defendant must show two things: (1) government inducement of the crime and (2) lack of predisposition. It's called subjective because the focus is on the defendant's predisposition. (Under the objective test, the focus is strictly on the outrageousness of the government conduct.)

I'm not comfortable with the government "manufacturing" crime. On the other hand, assuming the criminal law was proper (i.e. all crimes were rights violations), I'm not crying for anyone who would have done it anyway.

Could someone with a stronger knowledge of Objectivism shed some light on the government's proper role in criminal justice? Is "manufacturing" crime (again, assuming only rights violations are crimes) something Objectivism would endorse? My guess would be no, but I would appreciate a splash of reasoning and a citation or two. :)

For those (all three of us) interested in further discussion of the law of entrapment: U.S. v. Thickstun has a discussion of the factors involved in determining predisposition; Jacobson v. U.S. is (I think) the last Supreme Court case discussing entrapment, and has a good history and such; and U.S. v. Washington discusses an interesting recent theory called "derivative entrapment," whereby the government uses intermediaries (sometimes knowing, sometimes unknowing, which creates issues all over the place) to entrap.

[by the way, lest anyone think I spent a million years on this, I had to brief and argue a derivative entrapment case in first year moot court. See, I'm not a :lol:. (or so I'd like to think)]

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Entrapment is when a law enforcement officer "plants the seed" of the criminal deed in the mind of the offender. (i.e. Hey man, you know where I can score some cocaine?) I'm not sure whether the term entrapment can be applied to an agency "working with" a law enforcement agency. However, some restrictions placed on the LEO also apply to people who are acting on behalf of, or at the request of a law enforcement officer.

I think the most common two instances of where entrapment can potentially come into play are in vice-related and narcotic-related "crimes". In order to play this game, officers have to essentially play word games until the "suspect" hangs himself/herself with their own words or actions.

PS: It appears Matt was giving a more detailed explanation as I was typing my response. :lol:

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I'm not sure whether the term entrapment can be applied to an agency "working with" a law enforcement agency. However, some restrictions placed on the LEO also apply to people who are acting on behalf of, or at the request of a law enforcement officer.

The rules on derivative entrapment vary by federal circuit. As far as I know, the Supreme Court hasn't addressed it. Basically, you have three different scenarios. The first is in those circuits that don't allow derivative entrapment at all. The second is in those that allow it only when the intermediary knows he's working for an LEO. (Thanks for the "LEO," RC. Now I'm "in the know.") The third is in those that allow it whether the intermediary knows what he's doing or not, as in the Washington case cited above.

[Edit: Btw Vern, I did a quick search in the 4th Circuit, and unless U.S. v. Squillacote (2000) is no longer good law, defendants in your neck of the woods have no derivative entrapment defense. Discussion of derivative entrapment begins on page 46. Footnote 19 on page 47 addresses another interesting little twist to this defense.]

It appears Matt was giving a more detailed explanation as I was typing my response. :)

My central purpose in life is to wait in the wings and strike just before you figure out it's coming. :lol:

Edited by Groovenstein
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Moose, did you get a chance browse the cases that Groovenstein linked to? The rules in those seem pretty reasonable. The way I summarize the idea is that if the government has to go to unnatural length to entice someone to commit a crime, then it is less reasonable to assume that this person would have committed that crime in absence of such extreme provocation. My (admittedly lay person's) view is that this ought not to excuse the guilty completely, but I think the accused is basically saying: "This is an artificial situation. I would not do this 'in real life'."

The problem with private entrapment is that an accused along with another co-accused may claim that the co-accused induced him to commit a crime. However, suppose it can be proved that the co-conspirator never had any intention to be a conspirator and was indeed creating an unrealistic situation with the explicit purpose of inducing a crime. In this case, it is reasonable for the fact-finders to ask: "is this a 'real-life' situation".

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This raises various fundamental questions about privatized law enforcement. Government is (or should be) subject to objective control which is above and beyond simple "rights of any citizen". For example, any citizen has the right to open a shoe-store or to buy land for recreational purposes: the government does not. The actions of a citizen are evaluated by the citizen himself, and are not subject to independent, objective review: the actions of government should be objectively scrutinized.

The details of this group's actions are murky (in part because I didn't read all of the stuff they had on their web page, which is quite bogged down at the moment), so I have more questions than answers, but the fundamental question that I have is, given that they are acting as a vigilante group operating in the stead of the government, are they following just procedures? Have they stepped beyond the bounds that proper government is restricted to? Is there any objective control on the chain of custody of this evidence (y'all know how easy it is to falsify computer data, I assume). Are they claiming any special rights because they are "pursuing justice"? Most importantly, why is a vigilante group doing this and why aren't the police doing it? I suspect that the answer to the last question is partially the issue of resources: that there are only so many detectives and they are occupied both investigating rights violations and public morals offenses.

Only two of the ostensive transcripts were accessible when I checked them, and I would conclude on the basis of that that, taking the statements at face value the individuals were probably seriously considering an act that is illegal, and that should be illegal. I cannot get a clear picture of is exactly what act the pervs committed which resulted in their conviction. It also seemed clear that the pervs were predisposed to an act in advance of the setup, so the fake 14 year olds did not plant the idea of acting against the law in the mind of the person. However they were just a millimeter inside that line. I don't feel any sympathy for the perverts, but there are problems here in the concepts of crime and the propriety of vigilantism that bug me. Prostitution is (wrongly) a crime but it's not just a crime for the whore, it's a crime for the john. As I recall (and I'm feeling lazy plus I have leaves to rake so I'll just use memory rather than research), it is against the law in Florida for a 14 year old to have sex with an adult and the 14 year old can in principle be prosecuted. So if the pederasty laws are construed as also applying to sex between adults where one of the parties pretends to be a minor, then it's hard to see why posing as a 14 year old and offering sex to an adult shouldn't be treated the same as actually being a 14 year old offering sex to an adult. That is, if "as if" counts the same as "actually is", then it should count the same, period. Otherwise, we should have laws that explicitly recognise that acts which would otherwise be illegal become legal when carried out for the purpose of getting the scum off the streets, at least in certain prescribed cases.

I guess my basic objection to this kind of setup is that it encourages epistemological confusion over what is proper law.

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In order to succeed with an entrapment defense under the subjective test, the defendant must show two things: (1) government inducement of the crime and (2) lack of predisposition.

I misspoke on this. Those are the two elements, but I shouldn't have said "the defendant must show." I think once the accused shows inducement, the burden switches to the government to show predisposition.

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