Principle Of Double Effect In Entrapment Law

Principle of Double Effect in Entrapment

In law, we desire to see whether or not the person truly intended to do the crime. We desire to know the amount of agency she had within herself to commit or not commit crime. If she did not have this agency, she most likely was entrapped and does not deserve punishment. The people who are not entrapped are those who would have committed the crime regardless of the involvement by the police. Therefore, they cannot be permitted to entrapment for a legal defense because they themselves initiated the causal change of guilt. The cause was not initiated by the police; instead, the police were simply able to deduce from certain circumstances that a crime was taking place and an arrest was inevitable.

Gerald Dworkin is one of the leading philosophers on entrapment law and points to the fact most arrests are left up to normal citizens to report laws are being broken. Police, therefore, act as reactive enforcement—dependent upon what the citizens report to the police. There are few opportunities to give the police increased agency in actively pursuing criminals. If the police are given more power, perhaps they would be able to catch criminals before they could do serious harm to people. This rationalization is what leads to governments being sanctioned to set up cases which criminals may plead innocence due to entrapment. Of course, it is the goal of the police to set up instances and circumstances which are not affected by entrapment law. Entrapment is a defense to a criminal charge in which the entrapped individual becomes the victim of officials overusing their power in hopes of deterring crime. In the process of deterring crime, governmental officials go from merely shadowing the int...

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...g to uphold it. Letting the government break the law in hopes of deterring criminals seems rather counterintuitive. How do you suppose the criminal would react? Isn’t it more likely this double standard would infuriate and incentivize the criminal to act even more unlawfully? Perhaps this pure speculation, but it is true if we were allow this seemingly contradiction (police following and breaking the law) to exist, we must ask ourselves if we trust our sovereign enough to know when it is appropriate to break the law for the betterment of society. I do not believe we are ready to do that, so we must continue to advance the consciousness surrounding entrapment law through future cases. Ultimately, we know imprisoning more criminals is also not the answer. If we can prevent people from being involved in criminal activity, we are succeeding in deterring crime.