In Mid-November, a DEA agent – dressed up like a FedEx driver – dropped off a package of cocaine at home in Baltimore. A woman answered the door and accepted the package, so police started planning to get a search warrant. Before the warrant could come through, The Baltimore Sun reports, police “said a man, later identified as 25-year-old Stephen Waters, walked out of the home and looked ‘frantically up and down the street.’” In response, a Maryland State Police tactical team obtained a warrant and retrieved the parcel, along with $19,000.

This little play is called a sting: an operation designed to expose a crime, usually with the help of an undercover agent or cooperating member of society. In this case, the DEA agent went undercover as a delivery person to hand over drugs, and the person at the door accepted said drugs. Stings do not have to be elaborate, though we tend to think of them that way.

How undercover work differs from entrapment

Law enforcement agencies are not obligated to tell you the truth. We see this in interrogations all the time, where police lie to suspects in hopes of getting them to confess to the crime. This allowance extends to undercover operations, as well.

What law enforcement cannot do is coerce a person into committing a crime, or they can be accused of entrapment. The difference is crucial: in a sting, law enforcement engages in an illegal activity that would have occurred anyway, to catch the alleged criminal in the act. Entrapment, however, involves luring a potential suspect into committing a crime that he or she may not have committed had the undercover agent not induced him or her to do. For example:

• Sting: an undercover agent dresses as a prostitute, hangs around areas where people cruise for prostitutes, and then arrests a person who pays money to have sex with a prostitute.
• Entrapment: An undercover agent convinces his friend to go to a certain block and hire a prostitute, and said prostitute turns out to also be an undercover agent.

In using the example of the Sun story, the DEA agent did not force anyone at that Baltimore home to accept the drugs; the agent merely wore a different uniform to deliver them. As such, it was a successful sting, not an act of entrapment.

The line between legal operations and illegal entrapment is not always clear

If you think that a sting and entrapment sound a bit too much alike, you are not wrong: the line between what is legal and what is illegal is blurry at best. Per Vox:

Under the pretext of stopping terror attacks before they happen, federal agencies like the FBI, NSA, and CIA target networks based often on nothing more valid than religious affiliation. “Sting” operations perform a pernicious part of this equation by drawing otherwise harmless individuals into situations wherein they are framed, and then punished, as terrorists.

As human Rights Watch noted, “Multiple studies have found that nearly 50 percent of the federal counterterrorism convictions since September 11, 2001, resulted from informant-based cases. Almost 30 percent were sting operations in which the informant played an active role in the underlying plot.” This means that FBI involvement has been the sine qua non* of nearly a third of federal terror convictions (and therefore plots). The government is creating the very terror it claims to fight.

(*Sine qua non is an essential condition of a thing. It translates to “without which, not,” which means, in essence, “if there is no Thing A, then Thing B cannot exist/ would not be possible.”)

This may seem like an extreme example, but it is a fairly common one. It is especially common in operations involving cybersex; technically, a person does not even need to commit a crime to be arrested, charged, and convicted as a result of these types of operations. Theft, hacking, dog fighting, drugs – all of these crimes can lend themselves to a sting operation, but they are not the only ones. That is why it is so important to seek legal representation if you have been arrested or charged with a crime.

At Carey Law Office, we work to have your charges dismissed outright when we believe that a line has been crossed by law enforcement. With offices in Bowie and Crofton, we are close by to help you when you need us the most. If you are facing criminal charges, please call us at 301-464-2500 or complete our contact form to make an appointment.