If you are facing criminal charges, one potential defense option you may want to consider is entrapment. By making this claim, you are not denying that you took part in the illegal activity leading to your own arrest. You did. Instead, you are suggesting that you were coerced or manipulated into that activity by law enforcement officers.
Essentially, it is illegal for the police to convince someone to commit a crime just so that they can then turn around and arrest that person for the same crime. If they do, it’s known as entrapment, and the charges may have to be dropped.
How would this happen?
Entrapment occurs when the idea for the crime comes from the law enforcement officers themselves. They are not supposed to “implant in an innocent person’s mind the disposition to commit a criminal act.”
Say that officers approach a college student and give them illegal drugs to sell to their fellow college students. Once those drug sales have been completed, the police arrest everyone involved, including the person who made the sales. But that person could claim that they were a victim of entrapment because they never would have engaged in the illegal drug trade in the first place if the officers hadn’t made it possible.
This is different than undercover police work. An officer can be undercover and may participate in certain activities that could later lead to arrest. But that is much different than the officer directly being the cause of those activities or the reason why they took place. If the police were responsible for someone else’s criminal act, they are prohibited from prosecuting that person for that act.
Entrapment can be a very effective defense, but it’s also complicated. Make sure you know exactly what legal steps to take if you’re facing charges.