On Tue, 02 Feb 2010 21:51:11 -0300, Nicolas Alvarez wrote:

> Jim Henderson wrote:
>> If the person is given no choice in committing the crime, then it's
>> entrapment.  If the cop says to the second party "kill that guy or I
>> kill you" and then arrests the second party, that's entrapment.  If the
>> second party has a reasonable chance of declining to participate, then
>> it's not.
> 
> I don't think that's right. Even if you have the right to decline to buy
> drugs, but the (undercover unidentified cop) insists repeatedly in
> getting you to buy, that may be enough to call it entrapment.

That would probably be, yes - if they walk away from it, it seems to me 
that the sting ends there.

> Without the ability to test alternate realities, it's hard to know
> whether you'd have committed the crime otherwise or not.

The idea is that if there's a precedent.  With drug users, that precedent 
is driven in part by the addiction from many drugs, so it becomes a 
predictor.

Interestingly, the cop I talked to about this said he prefers civil cases 
rather than criminal cases, because the law is a lot more clear-cut in 
civil court, in part because the standards of "reasonable doubt" are 
different - I think that's because the judgments are financial rather 
than, say, prison - you can't put someone in prison "part time" (though 
you can reduce the sentence, but that's not quite the same), but you can 
reduce a financial judgment based on evidence given.

Jim

Post a reply to this message