Entrapment

In criminal law, entrapment is a practice whereby a law enforcement agent or agent of the state induces a person to commit a criminal offense that the person would have otherwise been unlikely or unwilling to commit. It 'is the conception and planning of an offense by an officer or agent, and the procurement of its commission by one who would not have perpetrated it except for the trickery, persuasion or fraud of the officer or state agent.'To catch as in a trap; to insnare ; used chiefly or wholly in a figurative sense. To catch by artifices; to involve in difficulties or distresses; to entangle; to catch or involve in contraindications; in short, to involve in any difficulties from which an escape is not easy or possible. We are entrapped by the devices of evil men. We are sometimes entrapped in our own words. In criminal law, entrapment is a practice whereby a law enforcement agent or agent of the state induces a person to commit a criminal offense that the person would have otherwise been unlikely or unwilling to commit. It 'is the conception and planning of an offense by an officer or agent, and the procurement of its commission by one who would not have perpetrated it except for the trickery, persuasion or fraud of the officer or state agent.' Police conduct rising to the level of entrapment is broadly discouraged and thus, in many jurisdictions, is available as a defense against criminal liability. Sting operations, through which police officers or agents engage in deception to try to catch persons who are committing crimes, raise concerns about possible entrapment. Depending on the law in the jurisdiction, the prosecution may be required to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that the defendant was not entrapped or the defendant may be required to prove that they were entrapped as an affirmative defense. The word entrapment, from the verb 'to entrap', meaning to catch in a trap, was first used in this sense in 1899 in the United States Federal Court case of People v Braisted. The 1828 edition of Noah Webster's American Dictionary of the English Language defines entrap as: The Supreme Court of Canada developed the doctrine of entrapment in three major decisions: R. v. Amato, 2 S.C.R. 418, R. v. Mack, 2 S.C.R. 903, and R. v. Barnes, 1 S.C.R. 449.