Do you understand what it means, legally, to “attempt” a crime?
And do you understand what “entrapment” means, legally speaking?
Based on your first paragraph, I am willing to bet the answer to each of these questions is ‘no’ - but I am willing to be surprised on this point.
That’s the thing. Most abusers of girls and women are married men–that is, the people who have the most access to girls and women. It’s the most logical thing. But if you’re going to set up a sting for national TV where you need new suckers every week, it’s easier to do it on single men, who are obviously going to be more desperate. (I’m not condoning the men’s actions here; I’m just saying that, being single, they’re obviously going to be more likely to get caught with their cock in the grater.) As has been said numerous times, this whole thing at best diverts attention from the real problem, which is that real married men are abusing real girls who they’re related to, much more than chubby single losers are actually convincing 14-year-old girls to fuck them. The crime is infinitely worse, too–incest and rape are by definition several times more vile and probably dozens of times more damaging to the victim than simple statutory rape. (By “simple”, I mean no violence or other crimes involved.)
Bricker, you are a lawyer aren,t you.? Could you mount a defense to get them off?
We are guilty olfa bad vision. The idea that they are 50 yr old perverts, fat and balding,is probably way off. These people are your friends and neighbors. This sting will not make the world safer. It is TV.
It is possible that ,for some of these guys, this is their first crack at this. They are not child pervs ,but potential child pervs. Did they get lured into this by an adult.? Would they have actually gone through with it.? They are guilty of probably going after kids. But they actually did not. We are assuming they would have.
Willingness to commit the crime is a key element of it not being entrapment. You are operating from a legally incorrect POV. Many other stings operate the same way, simply offering the opportunity does not equal entapment. If for example an undercover officer claiming to be an underage girl sent the suspect $1,000 via paypal and said “if you come spend the afternoon fucking my brains out there is another $10,000 where that came from” you would have a clear case of entrapment. Alot of people who would never have considered it would go through with it if someone offered to pay them $10K for it after a legit $1K advance.
Of course who would believe a teenage girl has access to that kinda money to throw around…
Is this local law or is it national.? Does it vary from jurisdiction to jurisdiction?
I know in Michigan they stopped the police from halting all traffic on a road and checking for whatever crimes they could find. I also know other states still do it.
There are so many differences between “halting all traffic on a road and checking for whatever crimes they could find” and the stings under discussion here that I hesitate to even begin.
It’s very unlikely that any defense I would attempt would include either “entrapment” or “there was no crime here” because both of those ideas are manifestly incorrect, and would thus not be too useful as defense strategies.
Defense would have to depend on the individual facts. In most cases I’ve seen of the Dateline stings, though, the role of the defense attorney would be negotiating a good plea deal, because the Chris Hansen interviews usually amount to a full confession, and those conversations would be admissible…
No. They are guilty of ATTEMPTINg to go after kids. That itself is a crime.
But ,the defense against entrapment is they induced a crime that would not have occurred otherwise. Did they not talk to a guy at home on the computer and lure him from his home to a potential tryst. he may have just downloaded porn s all night. They made him an offer he could not resist.
IANAL, but I’m pretty sure that if someone is already pre-disposed to commit the crime, it’s not entrapment.
Mice are pre-disposed to eat cheese. Therefore it is NOT entrapment. They are already cheese-eaters.
No. That reasoning could apply to ANY crime involving a police sting: “If the undercover cop hadn’t been selling drugs, I would have walked right on by. But he called right out ot me and said, ‘Hey, man, want anything?’ and I couldn’t resist!” . . . . “But she looked so sexy standing on the corner; I never would have offered money for sex if she hadn’t been there!” The chat logs plainly show that each and every man “stung” originates the idea of sex first. There’s a whole website full of PJ chat logs. Find me ONE where the deocy mentions a sexual activity first. Find me ONE where the decoy mentions meeting first.
I’m not a lawyer, obviously, because otherwise I’d know this, so I’m going to ask and hope you can explain to me about the confessions.
Lets say that we take Dateline and Perverted Justice out of the situation entirely, so that it’s entirely the police doing the stings. Other than that, everything is exactly the same. The pervert comes to the door, a policewoman who looks like a kid invites him in, then she leaves and a detective comes in and asks him the same questions that Chris Hansen asks. Then the pervert leaves and the uniformed policemen arrest him, cuff him, and so on. It’s exactly the way it is, except it’s just the police.
So, under this hypothetical, is there any protection against self-incrimination?
The trigger for Miranda warnings is custodial interrogation. So – assuming our Detective ChrisHansenLike doesn’t give the guy a Miranda warning and get his explicit agreement to talk, the key element will be whether the suspect felt he was free to leave. I haven’t seen all the shows, but I’d say it would be a close question; as I recall, Hansen takes a very commanding approach: “Have a seat over there. Tell me what you’re doing here.” On the other hand, he displays no weapons, and the door is unlocked. It’s the kind of thing that could go either way.
As a defense attorney, I’d certainly argue that my guy felt he was in custody the moment he saw the television cameras, because he knew that the cops were going to pounce on him outside anyway. The prosecution would argue that knowledge of an impending arrest doesn’t create a per se custodial situation, and that the suspect had every right to get up and leave without saying a word. The judge’s ruling could go either way under those facts.
Truth is, though, even if the inculpatory interviews are suppressed, you’ve got enough evidence to convict.
My next, sort of related question is (and I’m just talking about the interviews here…obviously, like you said, there’s enough to convict without them), in the scenario I set up, everybody was a police officer.
Now obviously, the real Chris Hansen isn’t a police officer…he’s a journalist. I know that normally any protections you have against incrimination only apply when you’re talking to the police. If I go on the news and tell everybody I’m a serial killer, then obviously, that can go into evidence. But in something like the Dateline stings, Hansen is working really closely with the police. Is he still just a private citizen, or is he “effectively” a police officer for the purpose of the stings?
In another example, the cops can’t search your house without a search warrant. But is it ok for them to say, “Hey, Captain Amazing, go into Bricker’s house and look for drugs, and tell us if you find any.”?
http://media.www.mtsusidelines.com/media/storage/paper202/news/2007/07/11/Opinions/Failed.Sting.Endangers.Kids-2922459.shtml
Vigilante justice can be ugly. This report includes a suicide and a poor conviction rate.
If mice are pre-disposed to eat cheese, then all straight men and gay/bisexual women are pre-disposed to have sex with 14-year-old girls. It’s how humans are wired, and it takes a specific act of urge-denial to resist the temptation. Most of us find it easy to deny those urges. Some don’t. But there’s a big difference between setting up a sweet little homepage and waiting to see if someone stumbles on it, and going trolling for sex. Since we can assume that the average 14-year-old is not going to go trolling for sex with middle-aged men on the Internet, any attempt to emulate that behavior is going to catch men who weren’t going to commit the crime, by definition.
No. This is reasonably well-settled law. A person who is acting as an agent of law enforcement is subject to the strictures of the Fourth Amendment. They can’t skirt the Fourth Amendment by sending in a private citizen.
I don’t know.
As I hinted above, even if the police were to do what Hansen did, it’s far from clear that the action would result in suppression. Off the top of my head, I don’t know of any case law that addresses custodial interrogation by a private citizen, since you generally don’t encounter private citizens creating custodial situations.
Have you read this thread??
I ask because the article you post, an opinion piece from a student newspaper and authored by a “senior art education major” recaps (poorly) the same basic facts discussed at great length in this thread. Rather than discuss the conviction rate issue again, I would like to know if you are raising a new argument or if you are smply unaware of the preceding discussion.
If you are raising a new argument – what is it?
Thanks, Bricker. It probably doesn’t get said often enough around here, but I appreciate you taking the time to clear up some of the general legal questions I had about the whole thing.
Forgive me, but I really don’t see how one follows from the other. It seems that the dietary preferences of mice are not so intertwined with the sexual attitudes of humans that one necessarily implies the other.
I was just trying to point out that that analogy doesn’t really seem to work. Entrapment would require an otherwise law abiding mouse who is not likely to have eaten the unattended cheese who, after becoming the subject of enticement and persuasion, decides to eat the cheese. IME, no extra enticement is necessary. I just have to give the mouse an opportunity and he takes it.
My mousetraps don’t catch mice who’re otherwise not inclined to eat cheese cause I don’t have the time to try and entice them.
That’s not what I meant by “if”. What I meant was that it is a fact that mice are predisposed to eat cheese, and it is also a fact that all straight men and gay/bisexual women are predisposed to find 14-year-old girls sexually attractive.
All mice are inclined to eat cheese, but placing an enticing piece of cheese out in the open where a mouse can get to it is going to draw mice who would otherwise not have eaten your cheese. They would not have eaten your cheese because they would not have been able to reach it, and the so-called predators would probably not have had sex with real 14-year-old girls because real 14-year-old girls would probably not have seduced them on the Internet. The analogy does break down at some point, namely that humans are better able to resist sexual urges than mice are to resist the urge to eat cheese, but that doesn’t make it any more justifiable. There’s a reason they call it entrapment–it’s like a mousetrap. And as I said above, I don’t like mousetraps either. When I’ve had to choose between setting mousetraps and living with mice, I’ve named the mice.