THE LAW

Entrapment is more familiar as an act than a legal term. Its definition can be given as the inducement of a person to do something he would not have done under ordinary circumstances. For instance, a pharmacist is asked to sell a drug without prescription. He sells it. This is plainly illegal; he could have refused and ended the matter. But suppose he refuses and the customer insists, claims that his child is ill and the doctor unavailable, that he'd lost the prescription and this is the only way to alleviate the child's pain, offers valid identification and perhaps a large bribe. This customer pleads with him at length and the pharmacist finally gives in to find a badge flashing in his face and himself under arrest. The pharmacist committed an act which he would not have under ordinary circumstances. The officer here is libelous.

ure

The law against such official proced-

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was designed with consideration for human culpability in difficult situations. It reveals a psychological understanding not always associated with cold legality. And it was intended to apply to everyone which it does not. Officers of many vice squads and vagrancy details are given what amounts to free rein to pursue, entrap and arrest not only any who are unwisely human enough to succumb to their well-designed plots and impersonations, but those erroneously suspected. Their victims include, among many others, girls

and women who are seduced and arrested for prostitution and, most notably, homosexuals.

The reason that these persons are such easy prey and that the police get by without complaints filed against them lies in the sordidness of the accusation itself which the victim wants hushed up at all costs. Here the homosexual especially protects the police carefully by pleading guilty even if innocent and by paying whatever is demanded of him. He finds that silence is extremely golden. All but the rare homosexual feel they have too much to lose by fighting back; they support an illegal procedure which goes blithely on to strike down others of their group and then themselves again. Records show that a first arrest of this type is usually followed by at least one more. A common view says that this second arrest proves the validity of the first. A perhaps more accurate interpretation is that those who prey like docile victims.

From SUMMARY OF CALIFORNIA LAW, Sixth Edition, by WITKIN, Vol. 1, pages 909-10:

"5. Sec. 46. ENTRAPMENT. The defense

of entrapment is available where the crime was not contemplated by the defendant, but was actually planned and instigated by police offraud lured into its commission. Public policy ficers, and the defendant was by persuasion or is opposed to prosecution for crimes thus incited. But the police may use decoys, or furnish opportunities to commit crime, as a means of detection. If the defendant's criminal design committed or carried out his own criminal pur'originated with him, or if he intentionally pose, whether it originated with him or not, at the suggestion of another person, the fact that

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