ON ENTRAPMENT

My friend and podcast companion Chuck sent me an email today. After discussing my thoughts on the Rock of Love Bus Season Finale (really, Bret Michaels - Taya?), he wrote about the concept of entrapment, specifically as it relates to the people at "Perverted Justice."

Now, for those of you who don't know, Perverted Justice is a terrible name for an organization. Wait, there's more. They surf the internet and locate people who are trying to find minors to have sex with. They then have conversations with these people - the "perverts" from the organization's name - and lure them to a house, where the police or Dateline AND the police are set up, and the perverts are arrested for trying to have sex with a minor.

Let me be clear: I support the mission of this organization. Online sexual predators are bad, any way you slice it. However, it seems like what they are doing would be entrapment if they were, in fact, police officers. But because they are private citizens, they can lie to these people and set them up to be arrested (by passing along the information and chat logs to police) without it being considered entrapment. And that doesn't seem right.

For example, let's say there is a pervert named "Vernon." (I didn't want to pick the name of a friend, and I honestly have never met someone named "Vernon.") Vernon lives in Massachusetts, but then someone working for Perverted Justice pretends to be a 14 year-old in Rhode Island. Vernon is dumb and gross, and shows up at the fake house to have sex with this 14 year-old, and then gets arrested for, among other things, crossing state lines to have sex with a minor. And again, let me be clear: I in no way support Vernon in this instance. However, he wouldn't have crossed state lines to get "stung" if he hadn't been set up by someone PRETENDING to be 14 in a different state. It doesn't seem right that Vernon is going to have this federal charge when he was faked out by a private citizen. It does seem right, however, that Vernon is going to prison. So it boils down to this - do the ends justify the means?

Let's look at another situation? What if you say that someone stole something from you? You know the police need more proof, so you break into the place where it is kept to try and get some of it back to prove where it is. When you are going through this self-created sting operation, you get caught breaking and entering. You can't say "This is just like Perverted Justice! I am undercover as a private citizen!" No. You aren't perverted justice. You're actually OJ Simpson, during the arrest that actually sent him to prison. Way to go. I just totally entrapmented you into it.

Sucker.