In this 'researcher in focus' feature, meet the international team led by researchers from the Department of Philosophy exploring the ethical implications of entrapment within the criminal justice system.
Learn more about this project and meet the team in the podcast below
The project and the team
This three-year research project is led by Dr Stephen McLeod (Philosophy), with Dr Daniel Hill (Philosophy) and Prof. Attila Tanyi (UiT – The Arctic University of Norway) as Co-Investigators. Dr Tarek Yusari, formerly of the University of Oxford, completes the team as a full-time Postdoctoral Research Associate in Legal Philosophy.
Stephen McLeod has worked at Liverpool since 2003. He has published in various areas of analytic philosophy and on its history. He became interested in entrapment, forming a team to work on it with Daniel Hill and Attila Tanyi, in 2015, in reaction to an episode of the Channel 4 documentary series ‘Dispatches’ entitled ‘Politicians for Hire’.
Daniel Hill joined the University of Liverpool’s Department of Philosophy in 2000. Most of his early work was in philosophy of religion, in which he is still heavily involved, but he also became interested in questions of applied ethics and philosophy of law. When Steve McLeod came up with the idea of working on entrapment he eagerly joined in the project, and has found the philosophical questions raised by the practice of entrapment absolutely fascinating.
Attila Tanyi, before moving to Norway, where he presently works as Professor of Philosophy (UiT, The Arctic University of Norway), worked as Lecturer in Philosophy at the University of Liverpool. He, Daniel Hill, and Steve McLeod started to work on entrapment back in 2015, and have not stopped thinking about all the problems—ethical, legal, social—entrapment raises ever since
Tarek Yusari studied for his undergraduate degree in his native Chile, before coming to the UK in 2013 to study for his Master of Law and his doctorate at the University of Oxford. He has taught at Oxford in criminal law, jurisprudence, and moral and political philosophy, and is also experienced in legal practice.
Daniel Hill and Stephen McLeod became colleagues at Liverpool in 2003. In 2015, with their then Liverpool colleague Attila Tanyi, they became interested in entrapment in reaction to an episode of the Channel 4 documentary series ‘Dispatches’ entitled ‘Politicians for Hire’. The team has published several articles on facets of entrapment, leading to the current Leverhulme project that Tarek Yusari has joined as a postdoctoral researcher.
Questions about entrapment
The project builds on previous work on entrapment by Hill, McLeod, and Tanyi, and addresses the following questions:
- Definition: What makes an act one of entrapment?
- Permissibility: Is entrapment morally permissible? If so, under what constraints?
- Implications: What are entrapment’s normative implications for practical ethics and for criminal justice? (Does it affect culpability? What sort of remedy, if any, does it require?)
Imagine that an undercover police officer (the agent) goes up to a suspected drug-dealer (the target), and asks to buy some drugs. The target agrees to sell the drugs, and is arrested. This is an example of state entrapment: an agent of the state has procured the commission of an offence so that the target might be prosecuted, convicted, and punished.
Is it ethically permissible for the agent to ask the target to break the law, when the agent is sworn to uphold the law? What if the target argues in court ‘it’s surely wrong to punish me for doing what a police officer asked me to do’? What if the target argues ‘I was just about to give up the trade, but I was tempted by the police to do it one last time—if the agent hadn’t asked me, I’d have never made another trade; this crime was created by the state’? Or ‘this was my very first trade; I had never done it before, so the agent had no good reason to target me’? Or suppose that the target is suspicious and refuses to sell—how far is the agent allowed to go in trying to overcome the target’s resistance?
Different approaches to entrapment
Different jurisdictions approach entrapment in different ways. In the United States, if a federal agent induces the target into committing a crime that the target was predisposed to commit then the courts will convict the target. If, on the other hand, the target was not predisposed to commit the crime then the courts will find the target not guilty. In England and Wales, by contrast, the focus is not on whether the target was predisposed, but on whether the agent crossed the line from the (permissible, say the courts) offering of ‘an unexceptional opportunity to commit a crime’ to the (impermissible, say the courts) ‘luring a person into committing a crime’. If the agent crossed the line, then the courts will not allow a prosecution to proceed, even though they will not deny that the target is guilty of the crime.
Questions about entrapment arise in connection with many crimes, not just drug-dealing. For example, law-enforcement agents have been accused of using entrapment to try to catch suspected terrorists. A relatively new phenomenon is that of the on-line ‘paedophile hunter’. Here a concerned member of the public pretends to be a minor interested in sexual contact with an adult. If an adult makes contact, then the adult is lured to a meeting place to be apprehended.
Entrapment raises many difficult questions concerning criminal responsibility, the state’s standing to punish criminals, the ethics of instigating others to crime, and the integrity of systems of criminal justice.
Explore more of the research taking place across the Philosophy Department here.