Sometimes, law enforcement agencies in order to catch criminals go the extra mile by setting up traps for the alleged criminals to fall into.
For instance, when the government of Edo state, Nigeria decided to take aggressive action against street prostitution in the city of Benin and chased the roadside prostitutes away from the regular stands, Some policemen or task forces set up by the Edo state government will sometimes disguise and appear like patrons of the prostitutes; how they operated was that they will approach a random girl standing by or walking around this renown prostitutes stand, they negotiate the price with the girl for sex and once the girl accepts the fee for the sex, thereby agreeing that she is a street prostitute the task force will bring out their handcuffs and get her arrested.
This is called entrapment and it is a valid defence in criminal trials, i.e. the girl arrested or the alleged prostitute that was arrested through this ploy of the task force when charged to court can raise the defence of entrapment and she could be acquitted by the defence.
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The most prevalent entrapment used by law enforcement agencies in the USA is law enforcement agents pretending to be minors or underage girls on social media and engage in sensual and sexual conversations with adults in other to catch or arrest paedophiles: A law enforcement agent will create a social media account and pretends to be a minor or an underage girl, then initiates a sex chat with an adult, once the adult offers to meet the minor physically for sex, the agent will burst the adult and arrest him for being a paedophile.
This is also another example of entrapment but for this defence to successfully get a suspect an acquittal, the law enforcement agents must have been the ones that induced the suspect to commit the crime.
Therefore, the entrapment defence is used when an accused person while facing trial alleges that he never would have committed the crime or he never would have formed the intent (the mens rea) to commit the crime if a law enforcement officer had not invited, inspired, incited, persuaded and lured him to commit the crime. The defence of entrapment is thereby established where the defendant engaged in criminal conduct after being induced or encouraged to do so by law enforcement who was trying to obtain evidence against that defendant. This is most common in drug cases both possession and sale of a controlled substance and prostitution cases just like the early example I raised.
The most populous case in the history of criminal trials where the defence of entrapment was used as a defence to acquit an accused person despite the fact that he was caught red-handed committing the crime was the case of United States v. John DeLorean, 561 F. Supp. 797 (C.D. Cal. 1983).
In this case, John Z. DeLorean, a renowned American car builder and one of the richest men in America (at that time) was arrested on October 19, 1982, by the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI). He was caught with 55 pounds of cocaine in his hotel room and was immediately charged to court for smuggling drugs, conspiracy to obtain and distribute cocaine etc.
What could have led a renowned automotive builder and one of the richest men in America to start dealing and smuggling drugs?
His (John DeLorean’s) car company was on the verge of going bankrupt and he needed $17 million to save the company from collapse. He was desperately in need of money to save his company. Out of this desperation, he was approached by a person claiming to be an investor named James Hoffman who claimed to have a business opportunity to help save DeLorean’s company. Unknown to DeLorean, James Hoffman, was an FBI informant who decided with the help of the FBI to prance on DeLorean’s desperation for money and entrap him into smuggling drugs to sell in order for him to raise money and save his company.
DeLorean’s attorney successfully argued the defence of entrapment claiming that John Delorean, a reputable inventor and businessman would never have thought of engaging in drug smuggling had the FBI through their informant not induced and incited him to. He was therefore based on this defence acquitted of all the drug charges brought against him after two years of trial.
It should be noted however that the defence of entrapment can only be valid if raised in victimless crimes, such as buying illegal narcotics or soliciting prostitution. Charges of violent crimes like rape or murder or robbery cannot usually be avoided or evaded by the accused by raising the defence of entrapment.