[blindLaw] Help Understanding Entrapment

Wed Nov 2 23:31:53 UTC 2022

Fair enough. Everyone starts somewhere. What's more important than asking
newbie questions is figuring out how to find good answers.

I strongly recommend you try reading through some basic textbooks on
criminal law and procedure. Possibly constitutional law or international
treaty law as well, though that's much broader. If you have questions that
aren't covered in the text, or where you find an inconsistency in the text
or something that makes no common sense though you understand the formal
sense, you're much, much more likely to come up with interesting questions.

If you have access to BARD or bookshare.org, or their equivalents in other
countries, there are multiple reasonably good books available in audio or
braille (albeit not the most recent editions).

Make sure it's written about your country; anything common law will be very
broadly correct about any common law country (i.e. the UK and anything that
used to be a UK colony, like the US), but a lot significantly different.
Though knowing comparative law is very useful (especially if you're
interested in policy making), that's probably above your head at the
moment; better to get oriented on your country's law first.

Note that in the US, almost all criminal prosecutions are under state law,
not federal, and states have quite a lot of diversity. So do the various
federal court of appeals; there are lots of weird circuit splits. Anyway,
most intro US criminal law textbooks will be broad enough to be fine for
the entire country, but if you actually want to do criminal law in real
life, you'll need to also study specific state law. But start with the
generic version.

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, 07:02 Thomas Dukeman via BlindLaw, <blindlaw at nfbnet.org>
wrote:

> 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
>
> Sent from Mail<https://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=550986> for Windows
>
> 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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