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Judge: Cops Can Impersonate Owner Of Seized Cell Phones
Aryden writes with news of a recent court decision in which a judge ruled it was acceptable for police to impersonate the owner of a cell phone they had seized, in order to extract information from the owner's friends. The ruling stems from an incident in 2009 when police officers seized the iPhone of a suspected drug dealer, then used text messages to set up a meeting with another person seeking drugs.
"'There is no long history and tradition of strict legislative protection of a text message sent to, displayed, and received from its intended destination, another person's iPhone,' Penoyar wrote in his decision. He pointed to a 1990 case in which the police seized a suspected drug dealer's pager as an example. The officers observed which phone numbers appeared on the pager, called those numbers back, and arranged fake drug purchases with the people on the other end of the line. A federal appeals court held that the pager owner's Fourth Amendment rights against unreasonable search and seizure were not violated because the pager is 'nothing more than a contemporary receptacle for telephone numbers,' akin to an address book. The court also held that someone who sends his phone number to a pager has no reasonable expectation of privacy because he can't be sure that the pager will be in the hands of its owner. Judge Penoyar said that the same reasoning applies to text messages sent to an iPhone. While text messages may be legally protected in transit, he argued that they lose privacy protections once they have been delivered to a target device in the hands of the police."
I always assumed they would do this.
To offset political mods, replace Flamebait with Insightful.
Entrapment is the FBI forcing you to buy drugs. It is not entrapment if the FBI catches you attempting to buy drugs. This is why sting operations work. In a sting someone pretends to be offering %illegalstuff% and they wait for customers, who are then arrested. The logic is that the person arrested was attempting to commit a crime and would have done so even without FBI intervention.
To offset political mods, replace Flamebait with Insightful.
For it to be entrapment, the police have to initiate the wrongdoing - e.g., if an undercover cop asks you out of the blue if you'd like to buy drugs, that's entrapment. If you call a known drug dealer and tell the guy on the other end (who happens to be a cop) of the phone you want some pot, that's not entrapment.
It is not entrapment.
I can't find the tutorial on entrapment that is set up as comics, so wikipedia will have to do.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Entrapment
In criminal law, entrapment is conduct by a law enforcement agent inducing a person to commit an offense that the person would otherwise have been unlikely to commit.[1] In many jurisdictions, entrapment is a possible defense against criminal liability. However, there is no entrapment where a person is ready and willing to break the law and the government agents merely provide what appears to be a favorable opportunity for the person to commit the crime. For example, it is not entrapment for a government agent to pretend to be someone else and to offer, either directly or through an informant or other decoy, to engage in an unlawful transaction with the person (see sting operation). So, a person would not be a victim of entrapment if the person was ready, willing and able to commit the crime charged in the indictment whenever opportunity was afforded, and that government officers or their agents did no more than offer an opportunity.
Don't know something? Look it up. Still don't know? Then ask.
Entrapment is the FBI forcing you to buy drugs.
No, that's the old definition. I believe that's called SOP now.
http://www.talkleft.com/story/2009/5/15/121647/790
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Couldn't the same also be said about snail mail - that you have no reasonable expectation that the envelope will be opened by the recipient?
I must say, I find it slightly disturbing that there is no reasonable expectation that the owner of the phone is the one who will be reading my correspondence. What reasonable person does *not* expect someone to be in position of their own property? If it was not reasonable to believe the owner of a phone is the one holding it, why would we use such phones for communication?
:(){
The way I look at it, it's always been done: except in the past, they turned the actual guy, and he went from being a drug dealer to impersonating a drug dealer. Is it really that different that the person at the other end of the cell phone is now an actual cop impersonating a drug dealer? At the core, the drug buyer has been and is now dealing with a fraud - somebody who says they're a drug dealer, but isn't.
I really don't see how that is some new concept.
Those who can, do. Those who can't, sue.
Are you talking about this comic strip?
http://thecriminallawyer.tumblr.com/post/19810672629/12-i-was-entrapped
They didn't forget to take the drugs/pipes. They correctly recognized that if they took the drugs they had to charge someone with possessing them, if they charged someone with posessing them that person would be banned from getting financial aid for school. The cops made the choice to be decent about it and handle the noise complaint without ruining anyone's life. Kudos to those officers.
Snowden and Manning are heroes.
If you think Bait Car is illegal you've got a pretty bizarre and incorrect view of our legal system.
Bait Car simply sets up a situation where someone who wants to steal a car can do so with the bonus that they get cameras, remote kill switch et al with that car. Bait Car is pretty cut and dried -- it's not even close to impersonating a drug dealer which might entice someone to buy drugs that maybe wouldn't have otherwise. Law abiding folks will walk by a Bait Car and do nothing to take advantage of it. Those who decide to steal it know they are breaking the law (watch how they glance around furtively and sometimes case the car and surrounding environment before getting in and stealing it if you doubt this).
Suppose Bait Car didn't leave the door unlocked or a nice pair of sunglasses on the center console and someone took a crowbar, smashed the window, hot wired the car, and drove it off. Would you think that would still make the "sting" illegal? Obviously not, but how is this different than what they actually do? Private citizens leave their car doors unlocked all the time and leave things of value in the car all the time and only criminals exploit this. The Bait Cars are not unusual in any way that would particularly entice a criminal to steal them vs. a private citizen's car which had been left unlocked.
Why is there an "insightful" mod and why isn't it "-1"? If I wanted insight, I wouldn't be reading
When I was a teenager a guy we all knew turned narc. He called me up and asked if I had any pot. I told him I had a tiny amount left and would smoke with him. He comes to my house and starts begging me to let him take some home. He tells me his stepfather is going to beat him unless he brings some home. After half an hour I get sick of this yoyo bugging me so I give him half a gram just so he'll get out of my house. He didn't even pay for it.
Fast forward a few months and I get pulled over and told I'm being charged with
-Possession with intent to distribute narcotics
-Sale and delivery of narcotics
-Maintaining a vehicle for the purpose of distributing narcotics
-Maintaining a dwelling for the purpose of distributing narcotics
-Conspiracy to distribute narcotics
On the (bad) advice of my lawyer I plead guilty to 3 out of 5 felonies.
Turns out this was part of our town police's two year long secret undercover investigation. Similar things happened to 8 of my friends, none of whom I would consider "drug dealers." Two years and who knows how much money spent, net result: a bunch of kids who could of had bright futures now with felonies on their records (since you're an adult at 16 in North Carolina).
This is the result of the war on drugs. Police departments need drug busts on a recurring basis to keep getting some of that sweet sweet federal drug enforcement money. What we end up with is a systematic campaign to label casual drug users (usually kids, they don't have the defensive paranoia older users have yet) as dealers and load them up with felonies.
Well, um, I've gone off on a bit of a rant, but the point (I think) was that I was guilty of simple possession, and I was entrapped into distribution that I otherwise was not interested in committing. I guess it's a but blurry considering I was willing to smoke with him... but either way claiming that I was maintaining my house and car for the purpose of conspiring to deal drugs is ludicrous.
TL;DR: A lot of cops suck, the drug war sucks, arresting kids sucks, and entrapment sucks. ;-)
This is my sig. There are many like it but this one is mine.
Sting: FBI tells you where they'll have drugs, you show up and offer money for drugs, you get arrested.
Entrapment: FBI shows up at your house, hands you an unlabeled opaque bag, and as soon as you have it in your hand, arrests you for drug possession.
This is probably the best short description I've seen, though there are certainly more complex shades-of-grey circumstances which are not as easy to break down.
When it can be shown that the person in question would have likely never been involved in a crime were it not for pressure induced by law enforcement it is typically considered entrapment.
Example:
Small-time pot dealer makes a deal to purchase a couple pounds of pot from an undercover agent. Agent says "By the way, I'd also like to buy a pound of coke. I'll waive the fee for the pot if you hook me up." Many orders of magnitude difference in the nature of the transaction, but the agent continues to put pressure on the dealer. Dealer eventually says, "Alright, I know a guy who can probably hook you up with it, but I don't deal with that myself, nor will I act as an intermediary except to introduce you." Dealer sets up a meeting, introduces the two, coke dealer and agent set up a buy. Agent pressures the pot dealer to be present at the coke exchange itself, rather than completing the meet and sale then giving the pot dealer their "commission" at a later point. Agent trades pot to dealer and cash to the coke dealer, and everyone is arrested for trafficking in a very large amount of cocaine and possession of marijuana. Even though it was a trade and to be completed each side must have possession of either the cocaine or the marijuana, participants are charged with possession of both packages.
The dealer in question, despite being involved in illegal activity, was entrapped into a criminal charge to which they were merely an accessory. The agent parleyed a relatively minor charge into a major one by virtue of "tying" the deals together temporally, even when they would otherwise have been separate deals involving different people, in order to hit everyone with any involvement at all with the most serious charge on the table.
That's a rough example of how a complex case of entrapment works, since a complete transcript of the event would be a minor novella. In the case above, the agent involved actually admitted that it was quite clearly a case of entrapment where the dealer absolutely would not have been involved in a deal of that type or magnitude absent significant pressure from law enforcement. However, the jurisdiction in question had no laws against entrapment at the time this occurred, making that fact irrelevant for the purposes of defending against the charges, and all ended up pleading guilty or taking a plea deal.
With the way things change, it would not surprise me if the above was no longer considered entrapment though; I haven't had reason or desire to keep up with the times in that regard.
That's a massively over-complex example. Here's a simple example of entrapment:
Undercover officer sees a guy on the streetcorner smoking a joint. Cop walks up to guy and says, "Hey, man, got any to sell?" Guy says "No. I don't sell the stuff. Personal use only." Cop says, "Come on, man, I just want a couple of joints to take to a party I'm going to. No big thing. I just don't know anybody around here." Guy says, "No, man. I told you. Go away." Cop says "Come ON, dude. Just two joints. I really need some. I'll give you $20."
Guy sighs and says, "Okay, man. I'm not into this but just this once. Here."
Cop arrests guy for dealing. (Depending on the state, if you sell ANY, it's a misdemeanor. Felony depends on amount.)
That's entrapment. The policeman talked him into doing something he would not normally do, in order to make the bust.