[QUOTE=joechip236]
My thoughts exactly. If the Conradt arrest was as sensible and legally sound as one of the other posters has repeatedly claimed, then there would be no need for decoy houses with fake teenagers and pitchers of margaritas in ANY of these cases. The cops would simply surround the alleged pedophile’s home and knock the door down. Do they ordinarily do this? No, they do not.
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An absolutely absurd line of reasoning.
A prostitution sting would be legally sound if the female decoy got into the car with the male target and waited for him to solicit sex for money, then pulled her badge and directed him to pull over while she called for backup.
Buut no police department in the country would permit a decoy officer to conducta string that way – not because the resulting arrest would be legally infirm, but because the threat to the officer’s safety is unacceptable.
For the same reason, “surrounding the alleged pedophile’s house” and “knocking down the door” are not tactics used by police for reason that have nothing to do with the legality the tactics, or the weakness of any resulting evidence. It’s much safe to lure the malefactor into a bait home, where the access to weapons is limited to whatever the accused might be carrying and the opportunity to flee is very limited.
It has nothing to do with legal soundness.
Now, if your point was simply that doing ti this way was unwise precisely because of the threat to officer (and accused) safety… yes. Quite true. But there are times when storming a house is necessary – to prevent destruction of the evidence, for example. Undoubtedly if Conradt had had a chance to destroy his laptop’s hard drive, you would now be arguing piously that there was no evidence showing he was the one that did the chatting in the first place.
We don’t place officers in physical jeopardy to conduct prostitution stings, because the crime is not considered serious enough to take the risk. We do put their lives at risk to storm meth labs, because the threat to public safety is great enough to justify that risk.
Here, you seem to be judging that a man willing to engage in highly explicitly sexually charged conversation, willing to arrange a meeting, with a juvenile is of no great threat to public safety – not enough, anyway, to justify these measures. I don’t agree.