People want to rent a hit man, and the fellow who runs the site calls the cops.
This seems like entrapment to me, and I’m surprised that police don’t ask for the web site to be shut down.
How is it entrapment for a private citizen has a web page?
Doesn’t the defense of entrapment usually require coercion or some kind of overbearing tactics that positively encourage someone to commit a crime? I cannot really imagine how the mere existence of a fake website that someone must search out could qualify. Sending out mass email or cold calling people to offer them hit man services, perhaps.
And I believe it would need to be a cop or someone else in some official capacity doing the entrapping? I’m not sure what the situation would be if a private citizen were doing something like this after the cops knew about it, if the cops allowed it to continue. From my extensive T.V.-based knowledge of legal proceedings, I think then there may be an argument that the person is acting on behalf of the cops.
By its very nature, a trap is useless unless you fuck with it. A hidden trap is one thing but when there’s a giant bear trap laying out in the middle of a parking lot with a “BEAR TRAP” sign on it, you can’t blame the owner of the bear trap if someone decides to stick their foot in it. Ppl r dum.
I imagine that if I left a bear trap on my sidewalk and the mailman stepped on it, I’d be arrested.
I don’t know what the legal definition of entrapment is, that is why I asked.
From DOJ website
Entrapment is a complete defense to a criminal charge, on the theory that “Government agents may not originate a criminal design, implant in an innocent person’s mind the disposition to commit a criminal act, and then induce commission of the crime so that the Government may prosecute.” Jacobson v. United States , 503 U.S. 540, 548 (1992). A valid entrapment defense has two related elements: (1) government inducement of the crime, and (2) the defendant’s lack of predisposition to engage in the criminal conduct. Mathews v. United States , 485 U.S. 58, 63 (1988). Of the two elements, predisposition is by far the more important.
It’s a dangerous game for a private citizen to be doing something like this. What if another private citizen contacts the website, they agree to a “hit” contract and exchange money, and both then claim to have been trying to catch bad guys? Or what if the guy who contacts your website is a cop, and you maintain the pretence of being a hitman a bit too long?
I seem to recall more than one occasion when someone charged with child pornography crimes claimed to be trying to catch child abusers. Almost certainly those people were lying, but there’s also a lesson there that you should always leave such things to the police.
For entrapment, it’s pretty much as Riemann says. It’s not enough that the person is merely offered an opportunity to commit a crime, the police (or their agents) must be going out of their way to pressure the person into committing the crime. It’s just like drug or prostitution stings. An undercover cop hanging out acting like a prostitute or a drug dealer can bust anyone who comes up and solicits the drugs or sex. If the cop was aggressively saying, “Hey, why don’t you buy some drugs, what are you a wimp, why aren’t you buying drugs, tough guy?!?!”, they would probably be entrapping the person.
Leaving a trap that can hurt someone just going about their regular daily duties falls under different laws. There have been cases of homeowners being charge with assaulting or injuring people with traps set up to catch burglars. The idea is that an unattended trap will catch anyone, even if they have a legal reason to be there (say, firefighters responding to a fire). A website that merely records your name and contact info isn’t really analogous.
Probably the best comparison is to those people who go on chat sites pretending to be kids, looking to catch pedophiles. There have been many successful prosecutions in such cases.
The website is laughably obviously fake and even the most cursory check would reveal that it’s clearly not someone soliciting real assassination contracts.
So the defense here will be not be entrapment, it will be not guilty be reason of mental disease or defect. Members of the jury, my client is an imbecile.
I didn’t realize Bret Hart was so hard up for work.
Did you even read the link in the OP?
Did you? Although it seems ridiculous, the website does not exist just as a joke, it is maintained for the purpose of catching people who apply for hitman services. And hundreds of people have done so. Setting aside the obvious stupidity required from the “clients” here, it does leads you to question whether this kind of thing is really a good idea.
From the article:
So, that doesn’t seem to be a real concern.
Scamgoddess has a pretty funny podcast about this website. Warning for language. https://www.listennotes.com/podcasts/scam-goddess/rent-a-hitman-dot-con-with-nJv1Qmz_adl/
What sort of a fool rents a hit man anyway? The vast majority of the time, leasing is the smartest option, and for the rest, it’s buying.
I did read the link. The reason I asked is that both of your posts I responded to suggest an unfamiliarity with the facts reported in it.
The website owner does not seem to be reasonably confusable with an actual purveyor of hitman services, and your suggested “I’m an idiot” defense (not sure that’s a real legal defense, but whatever) was not taken. The woman in question met with an undercover agent and gave him money to kill her husband, and then pled guilty.
So it seems to me that the website operator has done good. A woman who took multiple substantial real world steps to hire an assassin was stymied by this honeypot of a site rather than possibly continuing her schemes in some more effective manner, and she wasn’t able to get out of prosecution either.
Meh, she may not have done it if she didn’t find the web site.
At any rate, it isn’t entrapment because the police aren’t running the web site.
You would think that eventually the 1 star reviews would ruin the site.
Indeed. I imagine his site is toast now.