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Anyone remember Chris Hansen Dateline NBC "To Catch a Predator" show?
Where they would lure in guys off the internet to show up at a home for a date with a girl/boy they thought was age 12 to 15 after an inappropriate chat?
Where there wasn't actually a teen home alone it was a 19-year old perverted justice undercover decoy working with NBC and law enforcement and the guys were interviewed by Chris Hansen who would tell them to have a seat ....then they would step outside and be handcuffed, searched, questioned, booked, and bail would be set?
Well why was this not entrapment and what if the guy actually did what he did because he wanted to meet Chris Hansen and no other way to get in the home?
If the guy traced the location of the decoy to online warnings of a police presence and recognized this was the undercover home so to get invited in, made comments that fit the criteria for being invited to the house
And chris hansen would put it as "you planned to use this excuse should you have gotten caught and were in fact trying to meet a real teen.
And he says "no I was trying to meet you chris hansen, see I even wrote it down on this paper"
Chris hansen: "no you wrote it down as to get you off the hook in the event you met me instead of a real teen
The guy: No I KNEW you were chris hansen that's why i entered the door saying. "Hi chris"
Chris Hansen: but how did you know it WAS me?
The guy: because the decoy sounded too witty to be a real teen and I can prove it, I printed the chat logs same as you did. I KNEW I was coming to see you!
Chris hansen: no I'm not buying it. You did all this because SHOULD you run into me, you thought you would be off the hook! And if you were looking for me and suppose you were wrong and it was a real teen instead 'whooooops'....what then? You still risked committing the same act...soliciting a minor and what would lead you to not believe what the decoy was telling you?
The guy: no I had friends who found the cop presence and this seemed too coincidental the location and the fanciness of the home...I knew the area
Here Chris at 9:45pm I said to decoy "I want to be with you under that long pine tree....I know there are no other pine trees in that town except the one my friend showed me in that backyard
Decoy responded "oh i love tall pine trees I have a beautiful one in my backyard "laugh out loud"
Chris hansen: no of course there are other pine trees
The guy: oh there are?????? I didn't know im not a botanist!!!
Well why was this not entrapment and what if the guy actually did what he did because he wanted to meet Chris Hansen and no other way to get in the home?
That could be, but there was one episode(Harrier believes that it was filmed in the Dallas area) where charges were not filed against any of the people arrested, for lack of evidence.
That implies that the use of decoys is legally questionable.
Harrier always thought that the name Perverted Justice was appropriate for the organization.
These people spend their time in chat rooms pretending to be someone that they aren't, and are quite willing to accept a meeting in which they have reason to believe the other individual wishes to engage in sex with a minor.
You must be perverted to spend much time doing that.
Some of the guys that did these sick things have a good and better side to them, more along the lines of foolish/inappropriate/lack of common sense and immaturity rather than "dangerous predators". Particularly, men under age 22 who were caught in the sting and have lonely home lives are not the same as the ones who belong in the incarcerated for life group who are skilled, dominating predators who groom their prey. The one area the show did a lousy job in was separating the bad potential predators from the ones who were crying their eyes out and begging for mercy with good overtones despite the dumb deed they committed.
Take for example the kid whose mother was a prosecution attorney, who was just curious and handled himself stupidly on the internet, was submissive and not intent on instigating or provoking harm beyond having no business showing up at the house. Take also for example the 19-year old college kid who was crying hysterically and mistakened chris hansen for police. Take for example also the guy who had a perfectly appropriate chat with the decoy on the jersey beach before chris hansen walked on in. These guys each and every one of them did a moronic thing but would not be capable of committing the activities of the predators that ruin lives. More like the moron fool who got lured in.
Also the ones who showed up at the home who barely spoke fluent English do not appear the types that are truly dangerous predators. In some foreign nations it may be culturally less outrageous for a 25 year old man to pair with a young female because in the foreign country the age of consent may be lower.
Entrapment requires the police (or agents of the police) to goad a defendant into doing something they wouldn't normally do.
Sending an email to someone with an address of where to order child porn, and someone follows the link in the email and places an order is not entrapment. However, there have been cases that WERE ruled entrapment when the police sent an email a day for months on end trying to get someone to order.
Similarly, posting an ad to Craigslist, which I imagine is where most of these Dateline things started.. In and of itself is not entrapment. Responding to that ad is not proof of guilt, because normally the ads didn't mention an age or anything. Where the sticky part comes in is in what the bait said in followup emails. There's actually been some talk from Perverted Justice complaining that they're having a hard time keeping their ads up on Craigslist, because someone will reply to "Young girl home alone", they'll mention that they're 15 or whatever, and the person immediately reports the ad to Craigslist, which takes it down.
It's real important what the bait says.. If they just say "I'm 15.. I want to have sex with you, come on over, here's the address".. That's no entrapment. If the sucker says "No" and they continue the conversation to entice him to come over and he does.. That's where you get into entrapment. Which is also why if the bait gets a "No" answer, they generally immediately stop replying.
Entrapment requires the police (or agents of the police) to goad a defendant into doing something they wouldn't normally do.
Sending an email to someone with an address of where to order child porn, and someone follows the link in the email and places an order is not entrapment. However, there have been cases that WERE ruled entrapment when the police sent an email a day for months on end trying to get someone to order.
Similarly, posting an ad to Craigslist, which I imagine is where most of these Dateline things started.. In and of itself is not entrapment. Responding to that ad is not proof of guilt, because normally the ads didn't mention an age or anything. Where the sticky part comes in is in what the bait said in followup emails. There's actually been some talk from Perverted Justice complaining that they're having a hard time keeping their ads up on Craigslist, because someone will reply to "Young girl home alone", they'll mention that they're 15 or whatever, and the person immediately reports the ad to Craigslist, which takes it down.
It's real important what the bait says.. If they just say "I'm 15.. I want to have sex with you, come on over, here's the address".. That's no entrapment. If the sucker says "No" and they continue the conversation to entice him to come over and he does.. That's where you get into entrapment. Which is also why if the bait gets a "No" answer, they generally immediately stop replying.
Some of the cases were borderline entrapment because the bait were very enticing deliberately under the pretext setup "teens can behave like this" when in fact this kind of persistency is not actually consistent with teen behavior. For example, the "you don't want to do it with me??? This isn't fair...maybe you're just dinking with my head...well then don't tell anyone." And the use of very deliberate appeal to excite the potential predator....showing the predator pics with a lot of skin and just the right amount of appeal to make it rated PG.
In fact, you can have an adult do pretty much anything inappropriate and make the adult pose fictitiously as a child so that there is apparently no entrapment because a kid is exempt under being a kid for saying pretty much anything according to many adult judges, but scientifically it borders entrapment because real teens would not behave this way towards old creepy adult males.
And no most of the dateline show encounters were pre-2007 (early 2000s) in the age of myspace pages and AOL and yahoo internet chat rooms when people used to not have smartphones. Craigslist was not the common start point....would sit in their homes over a desktop or laptop.
Its pretty common. I work with criminal investigators and one told me just last week they set up a sting on craigslist. They posed as a 15 year old girl and got something like 70 replies in just one day. He said the funniest thing is their excuses like "I was just coming to see if she was alright"
And this is just in ONE area of the state.
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Anyone remember Chris Hansen Dateline NBC "To Catch a Predator" show?
