[blindLaw] Help Understanding Entrapment

[Thomas Dukeman]

I have not started law school yet. I am working on my Associate of Science degree for Paralegal studies because I live in the more rural outskirts of a small town. I am still trying to separate what I think I know about the subjects I might end up having to deal with from what I don’t know and what actually happens which is why it seems like I might be asking a lot of newbie questions or have seemingly immature mannerisms about things. I am just starting out my journey into the world of law and figure if I never ask, I’ll never grow. Hope that clears up any confusion about things. As to your response to my original question I thank you very much for setting aside time to help me out with my learning.

Thanks again,
Tom

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From: Sai via BlindLaw<mailto:blindlaw at nfbnet.org>
Sent: Wednesday, November 2, 2022 1:06 AM
To: Blind Law Mailing List<mailto:blindlaw at nfbnet.org>
Cc: Sai<mailto:sai at fiatfiendum.org>
Subject: Re: [blindLaw] Help Understanding Entrapment

1. Don't call someone a criminal if they haven't been convicted. Someone
who's merely been arrested is not even charged yet, let alone convicted.
They're innocent until proven guilty.


2. What you are describing is not entrapment, it's criminal conspiracy with
coercion or subornation. The defense to that is called "necessity", e.g.
"if I didn't do X they'd have killed my family, so I did it, knowing it was
wrong, but under duress because there was something worse that it avoided
and I had no real choice". That's extremely rare but happens sometimes.

One memorable case was from someone who escaped from prison by helicopter —
literally it just landed in the yard, he got in and flew away. He said he
did it because he was about to be murdered in prison and the guards
wouldn't or couldn't stop it, so he had no choice but to escape in order to
avoid being murdered. He turned himself in afterwards and was put back in a
different prison. He raised a partially successful defense of necessity, as
to the crime of escaping from prison, because it was necessary to defend
his life. (There was some ancillary event that he & his assistants couldn't
raise necessity for, though. I don't remember the details or outcome of
that.)


3. Entrapment is when the coercion is done by the government — i.e. when
the defense is "I wouldn't have done anything illegal *but for* the police
having forced or tricked me into doing something I didn't want to do". It's
also very rare as a defense.

That's a very controversial issue, because a lot of "sting" operations —
e.g. the FBI on supposed Muslim wannabe terrorists, who actually it turns
out had absolutely no interest and were entirely led into it by the FBI —
are very very very close to the edge between being forced or pressured or
groomed vs being solicited or asked in a way they could just refuse. The
defense is much, much narrower than most people think. It hardly ever works.


But, er, where are you getting these ideas? If you're in law school crim
pro, I'd expect you should be getting lots of example cases for everything…

Sincerely,
Sai
President, Fiat Fiendum, Inc., a 501(c)(3)

Sent from my mobile phone; please excuse the concision and autocorrect
errors.

On Wed, 2 Nov 2022, 01:16 Thomas Dukeman via BlindLaw, <blindlaw at nfbnet.org>
wrote:

> Good Evening fellow legal beagles!
>
> In the US, many criminals when arrested try to claim Entrapment as a way
> to avoid charges, but what exactly is it and when, if ever, can it be used
> to actually avoid a sentence? Id it like in some situations where a
> criminal coerces a person into commuting a crime they did not want to by
> setting them up like the whole “yeah you might be innocent. But what will
> blank think of you when they see this? Don’t want it to get out? Then do
> minor/major criminal offense X for me and it will disappear,”? By that, I
> mean pulling something innocent out of context to appear  criminal to force
> cooperation in an actual crime.
>
> Thanks for your time,
> Tom
>
> Sent from Mail<https://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=550986> for Windows
>
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