SEARCH BOX

Modus Operandi

State of Florida v. Donald Casper, 417 So.2d 263 (1982)

Upon these facts, the decoy simply provided the opportunity to commit a crime to anyone who succumbed to the lure of the bait. Accordingly, we uphold the trial court's ruling that, as a matter of law, the defendant was entrapped.

None of the unsolved robberies or thefts involved the same type of victim or modus operandi of this case. The Sheriff's office had no suspects or identifications of possible suspects for the thefts and robberies and did not employ the decoy to catch any particular individual.

Before conducting internet stings, law enforcement officials do not rely on any tips that criminal activity is afoot they only conduct them because they want to. According to the case law presented above, this is nothing more than entrapment especially because child predators do not search adult websites for minors to have sex with. A child predator is going to be looking for minors on minor oriented websites with the forethought that they want to victimize a minor even before they get on the internet. This is the very reason for the enactment of the child solicitation statutes, not to just randomly conduct stings in adult environments to see who takes the bait and encourage these men to participate in “illegal activity”. The ignorance of this rule is the main reason why most if not all men arrested in these stings do not have the appropriate predisposition to “commit the charged offenses”. Some people would argue that some of these men do have the appropriate predisposition but the Supreme Court decided a long time ago that it is better for some guilty people to go free than to have the government entrapping mostly innocent people.