If you provide pinball machine parts while telling them they’re nuclear bomb components, and they believe you, they might be idiots :).
Isn’t this one of the guys that wanted to drug test food stamp recipients?
I think you need a different test case.
A dog-and-pony show for people too stupid to realize that the War on Drugs has been the biggest waste of resources in American history, and an empirical failure in all regards.
Yay! They caught a bad guy! Goooooo Cops!!!
In general these types of cases are scripted to allow the police an easy way to show the defendant committed ALL elements of whatever the crime is in issue.
I didn’t read the details of this case, but that is why they do these controlled situations. In the terrorism cases mentioned above - they have gone so far as to give the person an actual detonation device. They actually tell the person something like “use this cell phone and call this number to detonate the bomb” or “press this button when you want to blow up the building”. Then they can put in the arrest warrant and show at trial “At 10:55 am the defendant was observed dialing the phone number which was actually a prepaid cell phone monitored by SA Smith who indicated he received a call at the exact time the subject had indicated he would call to blow up the IRS building.” Then some defense attorney has a much harder time arguing he was just doing it for a thrill and never had the intent needed.
Same thing with the drugs. Not sure what the elements are for possession, but you can be sure the cops orchestrated it so he would hit on all of them. Not entrapment and as others have mentioned - it is MUCH better to have cases go down like this - then try and monitor someone when they try and find a “real” hit man [hint - the guy you are meeting in the van to kill your husband/wife - he is really a state police office - don’t worry - he will do it for cheap], buy drugs from a real drug dealer (and then have to worry about arresting both people which makes things more dangerous), or the terrorist example.
And thank goodness for Madame Curie – if she had never lived, we wouldn’t know a thing about radium.
Your claim is fallacious – there would have been a crime, done at a slightly different time and aided by a real cocaine dealer.
…ETA after time expired: I see my point has been more than adequately discussed already. :smack:
Two days ago, Len Bias Would’ve Been 50 Today.
This was headline news back in 1986, especially in Washington, DC and Boston.
“legislative decision making process”, indeed. And Nancy Reagan had the “Just Say No To Drugs” thing going on, also.
Why didn’t someone important, like Jimmi Hendrix cause such a political outcry?
I get the :), but seriously, people looked at this like a wake up call. A rock star ODs? Happens all the time.
Bias, who played just outside DC at Maryland and was on the pages of The Washington Post and local TV before 24-hour sports coverage on cable became ubiquitous, was regarded as a perfect physical specimen–Coach K has said the two players that he’s seen in the ACC that stood out on a higher level than anyone else were Bias and Jordan–and the thinking was if lines of coke could kill Bias, well, coke could kill anyone.
Politically, you have Tip O’Neill’s hometown and DC directly involved as the story unfolded on the front pages of their newspapers and on the local newscasts.
As someone adamantly opposed to the War on Drugs, and in favor of legalization of pretty much everything, what I react to is this ridiculous notion that we are going to help society by criminalizing end users. Make recreational drugs cheap and freely available, and the entire chain of production–along with the cost of enforcing interdiction–will collapse. I doubt that either the coca farmers in Colombia and Peru, or any of the traffickers along the way, are conducting business to help a Congressman enjoy a nice high. They are in it for the money; not providing a social service that happens to be illegal.
But so are the enforcement agencies and their employees in it for the money. It’s a job. And the War on Drugs is a huge industry, highly beneficial as an employment stream to both drug- and enforcement-side employees.
There is no point in busting anyone for possession of anything they intend to use for personal recreation, be it cocaine or a vibrator toy.
As for entrapment? For things I do think we should be warring against, I sorta like the idea. Terrorism, e.g., as mentioned above. I think it’s one of the best ways to keep the riff raff from pulling off anything big.
I would add tax them and use the money to fund clinics, and teach the Peruvian farmers to grow useful things like tomatillos and peppers.
So here’s a recent blog post on taxing marijuana:
What’s The Best Way To Tax Marijuana? It Depends On What You Want
It looks at taxing to discourage use versus generating revenue.
Thanks, dasmoocher.
Why? Is it an easier tax to levy?
I think the take home message was that customers balk at taxes added to the cost of the product when they are aware of it, but don’t really care about point of sale tax.
For a legislative point of view, I don’t know much about how the tax is applied.
When I first suggested Gaudere’s Law I was thinking not just of grammar mistakes but of a broader definition to include beautiful examples of irony such as this. Bricker is committing the exact same error he is accusing (with cause) KarlGauss of having made. It simply does not logically follow that Representative Radel would have ended up buying cocaine elsewhere. He might have found God or been hit by a bus first or something. Certainly it is extremely likely that he would have purchased more cocaine but being likely to commit a crime is not a crime. Also there can be significant differences in outcome for similar crimes. Penalties for cocaine possession vary depending upon in which jurisdiction a crime is committed. Even if the Representative were going to commit a different crime he is not being accused of that crime but of one that would not have been possible without police cooperation.
One thing to keep in mind in discussing entrapment is the need to discount the simplistic conception that “good people” do good things and “bad people” do bad things. Psychology tells us that choices are dependent on the situation. I recall a story of an attractive young female officer who went undercover and later busted the person who thought he was her boyfriend for buying drugs for her at her request. I don’t know if that really happened but would you want to be prosecuted for the foolish illegal things you might have done as a young person while trying to get laid?
Say someone is really upset with their mother and is sitting in a bar and falls into a conversation with some tough who offers to throw Mama from a train for some quick cash. That someone might agree in that moment to pony up the funds but that doesn’t mean that if that chance meeting hadn’t taken place Mama would have to watch her back. Life isn’t simple and the law should reflect that.
I’m not sure we can base a workable legal system around the concept of waiting around to find out if criminals “really mean it” when they break the law, before we arrest them.
They sold him the cocaine. With no cops there is no crime.
Yeah, you said that already.
Here’s a story about an undercover police sting that put a professional hitman behind bars. This is the third time he’s been charged with murder - hopefully, this one will stick.
Do you think it would be better if the cops waited until he killed again before they arrested him, on the off-hand chance that he might wake up the next day with a sudden, new found respect for human life?
When someone misses the point it bears repeating. And since you’ve ignored it a 2nd time let me restate again my objection to cops creating crimes to arrest people for.
I’m not saying that there aren’t dangerous people out on the street. I’m not saying that law enforcement shouldn’t work to keep them from killing innocents. I’m just concerned lest police lead people into crimes. I guess if I was on the jury in Antonio McKiver’s trial I would carefully scrutinize the situations the authorities set up to see if they might have led the defendant along. Which then makes me a hypocrite since I would be accepting the same situation I objected to in the cocaine bust. Hurm. Looks like I’m more in the “sheesh it’s just coke” camp than in the “police stings are evil” camp.