Court Opinion

ID: 9470456
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-05 03:06:55.717665+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:41:54.902648
License: Public Domain

POSNER, Circuit Judge,
concurring.
I join Judge Pell’s opinion for the court without any reservations, and write separately merely to float a suggestion for giving practical content to the elusive concept, which is fundamental to the entrapment doctrine, of predisposition to commit a crime.
If the police entice someone to commit a crime who would not have done so without their blandishments, and then arrest him and he is prosecuted, convicted, and punished, law enforcement resources are squandered in the following sense: resources that could and should have been used in an effort to reduce the nation’s unacceptably high crime rate are used instead in the entirely sterile activity of first inciting and then punishing a crime. However, if the police are just inducing someone to commit sooner a crime he would have committed eventually, but to do so in controlled circumstances where the costs to the criminal justice system of apprehension and conviction are minimized, the police are economizing on resources. It is particularly difficult to catch arsonists, so if all the police were doing here was making it easier to catch an arsonist — not inducing someone to become an arsonist — they were using law enforcement resources properly and there is no occasion for judicial intervention. And I am persuaded that that is the situation in this case.
Thus in my view “entrapment” is merely the name we give to a particularly unproductive use of law enforcement resources, which our system properly condemns. If this is right, the implementing concept of “predisposition to crime” calls less for psychological conjecture than for a commonsense assessment of whether it is likely that the defendant would have committed the crime anyway — without the blandishments the police used on him — but at a time and place where it would have been more difficult for them to apprehend him and the state to convict him, or whether the police used threats or promises so powerful that a law-abiding individual was induced to commit a crime. If the latter is the case, the police tactics do not merely affect the timing and location of a crime; they cause crime.