[xnull2guest]

Please refer to what guide? The webcomic?

Can you be specific about which webcomic had law enforcement blackmailing someone? I didn't see one that covers our case there.

> 'because an innocent person would say "no".'

Doesn't that imply that all entrapment is legal? And is it even true? People can be blackmailed for things they haven't done and even easily give false confessions of guilt...

Thanks for the conversation Natsu. I don't think you're the legal expert I was hoping would be in this thread. Again thank you for sharing your opinion.

[Natsu]

Let's break down a few of these myths. The whole guide is worth a read. The author says it's roughly the equivalent of what 1Ls go through.

=====

Can the police give you the idea to do something bad?

YES - http://lawcomic.net/guide/?p=646

You're supposed to refuse.

=====

Can the police commit crimes along with you?

YES - http://lawcomic.net/guide/?p=649

There are limits, though, to what sort of crimes, explained in the guide. Assuming they haven't overstepped those bounds, they're not in trouble, and you are. Not only that, but YOU can even get charged for the crimes they did if you were both members of the same criminal conspiracy.

=====

If you're under duress, is it okay to kill someone to save your own life?

NO - http://lawcomic.net/guide/?p=813

It would be good to go back to review the necessity section, as well - http://lawcomic.net/guide/?p=722

EDIT: Fixed a mistake.

[xnull2guest]

They should make a web comic university. I wonder if someone could pass the Bar Exam...

None of these cover the scenario. They do not have to do with whether using coercion (let's say the leverage in the third example) counts as entrapment if done by the police.

The answer is yes.

You are continuing to try to use web comics to argue a strawman.

They are interesting web comics, for sure.

Whether it is okay or not to kill someone if you are under duress is tangential to whether it counts as entrapment.

Both can be true. It can not be okay - illegal - AND be entrapment on the part of the police.

The argument is that it was entrapment.

The argument was not about whether hiring a hitman would be okay or not.

Please, if you feel like getting the last word in, for the sake of readers who stumble onto this, cover the issue and not another straw man.

[Natsu]

I'm sorry you don't agree with me, but I can't help but point out that you've offered only your own opinions. You've not cited any law or description thereof, nor have you cited any of the court papers in this conversation. I've cited both and given sources for my reasoning.

Further, this is all 1L stuff (i.e. the basics). DRP's lawyers know all this stuff. And yet, as far as I can see, they didn't even try this argument. There's only one reason a lawyer doesn't raise an argument that would get their client off the hook: because it's bogus. (Raising bogus arguments in court is a bad idea... it wastes everyone's time and angers the judge, do it enough and you can get sanctioned.)

And they did cover the hitman issue--they most certainly did try to suppress the evidence that he hired a hitman (just not with arguments over entrapment). You can read more here:

https://s3.amazonaws.com/s3.documentcloud.org/documents/1391...

But not once did they say 'entrap'. You seem to be trying to argue that DPR wasn't predisposed to hiring hitmen before the cops got there, but that the cops convinced him that it was his only option.

I've covered why that doesn't cut it: the police CAN join your conspiracy, they CAN lie to you, they CAN give you the means (and the idea!) to commit the crime, and he DID have other options (he doesn't have to like them). Each of those cuts out elements of his defense, leaving nothing.

So the case you have to make is that the police overcame his resistance to hiring a hitman, but the chat logs given never show him saying "no, I don't want to do this" they show him as eager to make use of this "solution."

To establish a claim of entrapment, you have to show that he resisted the idea and that the police overcame this resistance. From there, courts may follow one of two approaches: deciding whether this defendant had been predisposed to commit the crime or whether this approach would have caused any law-abiding citizen to commit the crime.

I've been pointing to the latter approach, as I think it's more productive to take an objective approach than a subjective one. Were a law-abiding citizen in DPR's shoes, they would NOT have hired the hitman. A law-abiding citizen hit by this would have turned to the police for protection from the blackmail, not to a hitman.

The discussion of necessity and duress is relevant to whether he had "other options." Both of those are arguments that one does not have other real options. Because both of those unqestionably fail, he had other options.

To establish entrapment, you have to prove that he had no way out and that they used this to overcome resistance. In the example of actual entrapment, we have someone shown as refusing to commit a crime for money, then agreeing only because someone's life is at stake and the papers aren't really important.

Nowhere have you cited any of the chat logs with him showing resistance to hiring a hitman (this is required!). And then you have to show them overcoming this resistance.

Maybe if you can show the police telling him that police protection is worthless or shooting down his ideas for avoiding hiring a hitman you could get somewhere, but... no such evidence is on offer.

Rather, all of the evidence points to the fact that he was predisposed to commit this crime. From the legal brief cited above:

           The next day, Ulbricht told another coconspirator, CC-2, about the theft.  (Id.)  Ulbricht expressed surprise that the Employee had stolen from him given that he had a copy of the Employee’s driver’s license.  (Id. at 6-7.)  Later in the conversation, Ulbricht and CC-2 discussed the possibility that the Employee was cooperating with law enforcement, and CC-2 remarked:  

[A]s a side note, at what point in time do we decide that we’ve had enough of someone[’]s shit, and terminate them? Like, does impersonating a vendor to rip off a mid-level drug lord, using our rep and system; follows up by stealing from our vendors and clients and breeding fear and mis-trust, does that come close in your opinion. (Id. at 7.) Ulbricht responded, “terminate? execute?” and later stated, “I would have no problem wasting this guy.” (Id.) CC-2 responded that he could take care of it, and stated that he would have been surprised if Ulbricht “balked at taking the step, of bluntly, killing [the Employee] for fucking up just a wee bit too badly.” (Id.) Later that day, Ulbricht told CC-2 that he had solicited someone to track down the Employee. (Id.)

So if you want to argue this, take facts cited from court papers (e.g. papers filed by DPR's lawyers), then fit those to the elements of entrapment. Show me from the chat logs or similar sources where he exhibited resistance to the idea, then show me how the police convinced him to give up that resistance.

Because that's how you establish entrapment.

[themeek]

For the very same reasons through the rest of the thread, you continue to argue a straw man.

You sound like you're a very insistent and dogged debater.

It would be becoming of you to take your passion for argumentation and apply it to the arguments being made by the opposition. I'm certain that if you did this you would have more success.

I would reply point by point but as they say "the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again, but expecting different results."

Thanks again for the discussion. Hope to see you continue to be verbose (but perhaps more charitable) in other threads around HN.

[Natsu]

A straw man is beating up a weakened version of someone's case. I went with the facts before the Court, which are the only facts relevant to making a legal determination. Neither this Court nor a court of appeals is going to look at anything else due to the rules of evidence. Moreover, unless he's already raised the issue of entrapment (and I don't think he has), it's almost certainly been waived and cannot be raised on appeal. You can personally believe that the facts presented in court are wrong, if you prefer, but they're not relevant to a legal analysis. Making a non-legal analysis of whether it's "entrapment" makes zero sense--entrapment is a legal concept and divorcing the notion of entrapment from how a court would determine something is entrapment is insensible. It doesn't answer any real-world questions and it would serve only to mislead, as courts follow rules to determine things like these.

To establish entrapment, you need to locate some place in which he demonstrated some resistance to hiring a hitman, I was unable to find any such evidence in materials before the Court. If you think otherwise, quote anything you like from his log or any other evidence before the Court that shows him being averse to hiring a hitman until they talked him into it.

Without that, you don't get to claim entrapment, legally. The Court would just say you were already predisposed to commit the crime and ignore your protests about how the cops fooled you, as is shown repeatedly in the law guide. Moreover, the burden of proof is on you to establish entrapment, not the other way around. So it's not enough to say that but for the theft/blackmail he wouldn't have done this, you have to show him resisting the idea.

Was he set up by the cops? Undoubtedly so. Every single example in the law guide of non-entrapment shows the cops setting someone up. But there are standards for entrapment which must be met by evidence properly presented in court. If his lawyers do not make this argument, it is because they cannot. If someone suggests that "hey, you should hire this guy to kill that guy who's causing you problems," you will be in legal trouble if you go along with their suggestion instead of refusing it.

So 'charitable' has nothing to do with it. The evidence before the Court isn't very charitable to him. You might argue that this is unfair, but this is how you determine something like entrapment. That's why there are long fights over the evidence (like the one I linked earlier), because that determines what they have to work with.

[Natsu]

We can no longer reply in line, but:

> Given (A) that blackmail is coercion (psychological pressure), and (B) coercing someone into committing a crime is entrapment. Would (A) and (B) then not imply that (C) blackmailing should count as entrapment?

(A) isn't sufficient motive for hiring someone to murder someone (you have no right to use deadly force to protect mere property). Also, even if someone hold a gun to your head and tells you to kill someone else, it's still criminal if you do that (it's one of the examples in the law guide). This makes it nearly impossible to entrap someone into hiring a hitman, without even getting into the particulars of this case.

(B) is necessary, but not sufficient, to support a claim of entrapment.

A person must prove that they put up some resistance to committing the crime and that the police or their agents overcame this. So he needs a quote of him saying "NO" to the idea in the chat logs (or something equivalent to this, in the admitted evidence), then police pressure, then him changing his mind.

You can see how it played out in the law guide sample: the young lady refuses to commit the crime for money, but relents when a police agent tells her that lives are at stake. That refusal is very important!

As your source correctly states, a "defendant is assumed to have the responsibility to turn down an opportunity to commit a crime when posed by a law enforcement officer." The quotes quoted by the Court demonstrate the opposite, that he was very agreeable to the police's suggestion once offered, failing to meet this duty. Those demonstrate against the resistance he must show that he put up to claim entrapment.

If you can find something in the chat log, his legal briefs, or wherever that proves he said "no" before he said "yes", please offer it. Your source correctly confirms that he has the burden of proof to show this and establish entrapment.

> Law enforcement did not charge him for the hitman so the defense did not need to put up a case for entrapment

The hiring of the hitman was an element of the "continuing criminal enterprise" (CCE) charge, for which he was later convicted. This has been covered in previous discussions of the court documents. I am not clear on why you are still objecting to this.

I am also confused by your version of "charitable." It's not my intent to be disrespectful, but I can't reasonably claim that a case exists without evidence for it. I can't claim he's legally innocent, nor that he was denied due process, given that he was convicted by a jury of his peers in a court of law. I can't assume things to be in DPR's favor without admissible evidence showing that when analyzing how the law would treat this scenario. Nor can I shift the burden of proof in his favor when the law says otherwise.

That's now how law works.

I'm sorry if I come off as harsh, I certainly don't intend that. But you should be aware that real courts are absolutely hostile to such arguments. Not only would you get savaged by opposing counsel, you'd face motions for sanctions for wasting everyone's time.

I'm not going to sue anybody, I'm just going to point out that what you want to argue doesn't work because it doesn't meet the legal definitions :)

DPR can't properly meet either element of entrapment under either the subjective or objective standard due both to a lack of evidence and admitted evidence that shows him being agreeable to the suggestion. As the law guide says, "they're allowed to go after those who would say yes."

[themeek]

Specifically you did not reply to this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9628225

Is it (A), (B), or (C) that is incorrect?

It sounds like you are saying that (C) is incorrect. However you are confusing how this is shown in court - what needs to be established - from the principle and definition of coercion.

Law enforcement did not charge him for the hitman so the defense did not need to put up a case for entrapment, and as far as I can tell the legal defense dropped the ball a number of places. So it is not enough to point at the defense and backwards reason that if there were entrapment that it would have been established. There was no opportunity. There will be a separate hearing on the use of law enforcement coercion and we may see an argument and evidence presented there.

Neither of us would be willing or able to establish a full defense of DPR or a full case for law enforcement - suggesting that this is my responsibility is intellectually dishonest.

Take any number of resources:

http://www.pdxcriminallawyers.com/articles/entrapment-and-po...

"What Is Entrapment?

When it comes to police coercion, a defendant is assumed to have the responsibility to turn down an opportunity to commit a crime when posed by a law enforcement officer. Instead, a defendant will need to prove that the law enforcement officer took additional actions to force a person into an illegal act. The following may be considered sufficient actions to force a person into committing a crime they otherwise wouldn’t:

- Fraudulent claims or promises

- Depending on the specifics, verbal harassment or flattery

- Threats against a person, their property, or their job

If a defendant wants to cite entrapment, they have a duty to present proof of entrapment. As it is what is known as an affirmative defense, the defendant has to offer evidence to clear their willing involvement in a crime."

http://www.grayarea.com/entrap.htm

"So, a defendant cannot be exonerated of a crime on an entrapment claim even if he or she can prove that police had no reason whatsoever to suspect even the slightest of criminal inclinations. What they must prove is that were induced by police to commit the crime. This leads us to the second of the four questions: What constitutes inducement?

An officer merely approaching a defendant and requesting that they commit a crime does not. To claim inducement, a defendant must prove he or she was unduly persuaded, threatened, coerced, harassed or offered pleas based on sympathy or friendship by police. A defendant must demonstrate that the government conduct created a situation in which an otherwise law-abiding citizen would commit an offense."

Yes, what you are arguing against is a straw man. Quite simply you are not charitably interpreting the situation whereby law enforcement created a situation in which DPR had an incentive to hire a hitman as entrapment. It is the simulation of blackmail, fraud and threats to DPR's business that constitute coercion.

Merely suggesting that there be a hitman is not coercion. But simulating blackmail, defrauding him and threatening his business constitute coercion.

This is what we're talking about and you have repeatedly been ignoring.

Because you are arguing merely in the context of "they offered a hitman and he agreed" you are arguing against a weakened form of my argument.

My argument, in full, charitable form, can be seen in the second reference quoted.

"An officer merely approaching a defendant and requesting that they commit a crime does not. To claim inducement, a defendant must prove he or she was unduly persuaded, threatened, coerced, harassed or offered pleas based on sympathy or friendship by police. A defendant must demonstrate that the government conduct created a situation in which an otherwise law-abiding citizen would commit an offense."

An officer did not merely approach DPR and request that he commit a crime.

They simulated blackmail, fraud and threat to property: that is coercive.

Definitions of blackmail includes the word "coercion".

Please, I don't care how long your posts are if you don't bother to address the premises of the argument.

Because you are refusing to address the use of simulated blackmail and fraud to coerce DPR, you are not charitably engaging the argument. You are arguing against a straw man. You are pretending that law enforcement merely chatted with DPR online without setting up coercive pretenses.

Please, for your own sake, be charitable when debating people - either in person or online.