Entrapment

In criminal law, entrapment is a practice whereby a law enforcement agent induces a person to commit a criminal offence that the person would have otherwise been unlikely to commit. It "is the conception and planning of an offence by an officer, and his procurement of its commission by one who would not have perpetrated it except for the trickery, persuasion or fraud of the officer."

It is a conduct that is generally discouraged and thus, in many jurisdictions, is a possible defence against criminal liability.

Depending on the law in the jurisdiction, the prosecution may be required to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that the defendant was not entrapped or the defendant may be required to prove that they were entrapped as an affirmative defence.

Sting operations are fraught with ethical concerns over whether they constitute entrapment.

The word entrapment, from the verb "to ," meaning to catch in a trap, was first used in this sense in 1899 in the United States Federal Court case of People v Braisted.

The 1828 edition of Noah Webster's American Dictionary of the English Language defines entrap as:

The Supreme Court of Canada developed the doctrine of entrapment in three major decisions: R. v. Amato, [1982] 2 S.C.R. 418, R. v. Mack, [1988] 2 S.C.R. 903, and R. v. Barnes, [1991] 1 S.C.R. 449. There are two different forms of entrapment in Canadian law.

The first type of entrapment, "random virtue testing", occurs when the police offer an individual the opportunity to commit a crime without reasonable suspicion that either that individual or where that individual is located is associated with the criminal activity under investigation. If police have such a reasonable suspicion, they are still limited to providing only an opportunity to commit the offence.

The second form of entrapment occurs when the police go beyond merely providing an opportunity to commit an offence but actually induce the commission of the offense. Some factors a court may consider when deciding whether police have induced the offence include the type of crime being investigated, whether an average person would have been induced, the persistence and number of attempts made by the police, the type of inducement used (fraud, deceit, reward, ...), and the existence of expressed or implied threats.

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