If you have been charged with a drug crime, you may feel like you are caught and there’s nothing you can do. That is not the case. Everyone who is accused of a crime has the right to a defense, and you have several defense strategies available to you.
Depending on the exact circumstances of your case, you may pursue a defense strategy based on entrapment. Defendants attempt to use this strategy quite often, but it can be very difficult for them to be successful. In this blog post, we’ll take a closer look at entrapment.
Inducement to crime
Entrapment occurs when a government agent persuades, influences or induces a defendant to commit a crime that, otherwise, they would not have committed. Government agents are forbidden to induce an innocent person into committing a crime in order to prosecute them for that crime. If the court finds that they did so, the case against the defendant must be thrown out.
Of course, law enforcement officers use sting operations, informants and similar techniques all the time when they are arresting people on suspicion of drug crimes. For instance, a drug dealer might be approached by a potential customer, but after the sale is complete, the customer reveals themselves to be an undercover police officer and arrests the dealer. Is this kind of technique legal? For better or worse, the answer is, in most cases, yes. How can that be true?
A crime you otherwise would not have committed
There are two parts to your defense if you want to argue entrapment: First, you must show that the government induced you into committing the crime. This means more than merely asking you. They must have persuaded or even coerced you into committing the crime.
The next part is that this crime must have been something you otherwise would not have committed. This means you must show that you had no predisposition to commit such a crime.
In the example of the undercover officer above, we described the defendant as a drug dealer. If the the prosecution has evidence that the defendant was routinely engaged in the selling of illegal drugs, the defendant cannot convincingly claim that the undercover officer persuaded them to commit a crime they otherwise wouldn’t have committed. Therefore, the entrapment defense would fail.
This element is crucial. Even if you can show that the agent induced you to commit the crime, you must also show that you were not predisposed to commit the crime.
This can be very difficult to do. When it seeks to counter your arguments, the prosecution doesn’t even necessarily have to show that you were previously convicted of a similar crime. In some cases, courts have found that the fact that a defendant went along with the government agent’s persuasion was enough to show that the defendant had a predisposition toward committing the crime.
As you can imagine, the deck is stacked against you when you argue entrapment. However, depending on the exact details of your case, it may be possible to successfully pursue this strategy.