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Entrapment, Criminal Justice, and Ethics

On occasions, undercover police officers pose as drug users to purchase illicit drugs, with the aim of enabling the criminal prosecution of the seller. So-called ‘paedophile hunters’ pose online as minors. These hunters report to the police adults who, believing themselves to be communicating with minors, arrange to meet to engage in illegal sexual conduct. Journalists have posed as businesspeople covertly to record politicians undertaking to exercise their influence, for pay, on behalf of a fictitious company. 

These are all instances of what is commonly known as entrapment. When entrapment happens, one party, the ‘agent’, intentionally brings it about that another, the ‘target’, performs a forbidden or otherwise objectionable act, intending to have the target held responsible for having committed the act. The agent can be a law-enforcement official (‘state entrapment’) or a private party (‘private entrapment’). 

In the project ‘Entrapment, Criminal Justice, and Ethics’, funded by the Leverhulme Trust (£230,425, 2023–26), Dr Stephen McLeod (Liverpool, Principal Investigator), Dr Daniel Hill (Liverpool), Prof. Attila Tanyi (UiT – The Arctic University of Norway), and Dr Tarek Yusari (Liverpool) address the following questions: 

Definition. What makes an act one of entrapment? 

Permissibility. Is entrapment morally permissible? 

Implications. What are entrapment’s normative implications for practical ethics and for criminal justice? 

The project’s outputs include the first philosophical monograph on state entrapment and a series of articles on private entrapment, concerned, among other questions, with what bearing, if any, the identity of the agent has on the questions of permissibility and implications. 

Beyond analytic philosophy, the project draws from primary and secondary legal sources, criminology, sociology, and police and media studies. 

The work is relevant to the conduct of criminal trials, and to police and media ethics and regulation. 

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