Pubdate: Thu, 30 May 2013
Source: New Haven Register (CT)
Copyright: 2013 New Haven Register
Contact:  http://www.nhregister.com
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/292
Author: Norm Pattis
Note: Norm Pattis, a criminal defense and civil rights lawyer with
offices in Bethany and New Haven, blogs at www.pattisblog.com.
Page: B1

USE OF UNDERCOVER COPS IN SCHOOLS MAY BE MISGUIDED

CLIENTS OFTEN CLAIM entrapment when a police officer catches them
red-handed in some unlawful act, especially when one of the
participants is an undercover cop. It offends a sense of fair play to
learn, suddenly, that the voice on the other end of a telephone line
was actually a police officer pretending to be someone else. Isn't
police deception enough to prove entrapment?

The answer, sadly, is no. I've said it before and I will say it again:
The police are entitled to use deception to solve crimes. What the
police are not permitted to do is induce you to commit a crime. So
what is entrapment?

It is easier to say what it is not.

"A predisposition to commit the crime, which is triggered by
circumstances created by, or under the control of, the police, does
not set the stage for the defense of entrapment," our Supreme Court
ruled in 2010 in a case involving a man who claimed that he was set up
by the police to make a lewd telephone call to a minor.

Put another way, a person can claim entrapment only if they can show:
first, the government induced him to commit the crime; and, second,
that he would not otherwise have committed the crime. In many years of
defense work, I've only once presented an entrapment defense.

But consider the case of a young man in California whose parents, Doug
and Catherine Snodgrass, recently sued the Temecula Valley United
School District in California.

Here's their beef:

Their son, whose name is sealed in court records because he is a
juvenile, suffers from Asperger's syndrome and other disabilities. He
attends the Cahaparral High School as a special needs student. A young
man known in court records as "Daniel" also attends the school.

It turns out that Daniel is an undercover cop. That means he pretends
to be something he is not for a living. In this case, he pretended to
be a high school student while he was, in fact, a full-time employee
of the Riverside County Sheriff's Department.

Apparently, Daniel's mission was to help stamp out the use of illegal
narcotics among high school students, a laudable, if somewhat
impossible mission. So Daniel sidled up to young Mr. Snodgrass.

"Gimme some of your prescription medication," Daniel hissed. Young Mr.
Snodgrass refused.

Daniel was determined. Soon he was sending the boy text messages at
all hours of the day or night. When Daniel could not prevail upon the
young man to hand over his prescriptions, he got creative. He offered
to give the boy $20 to go out and buy him some marijuana. When the
young man did so, he was arrested, together with 20 other high school
students, all of whom were portrayed as miniature drug lords by the
local press. Entrapment? It just might be, but, unfortunately, young
Mr. Snodgrass decided to enter a plea in juvenile court rather than
hold the state to its burden of proof at trial. He was admitted into
what is known as a diversionary program, and must do 20 hours of
community service to satisfy his obligation to the state.

Had he taken the case to trial, the state would have been required to
show that the boy was predisposed to commit a crime, and that the
police officer did no more than provide him, in effect, with an
opportunity to something he would otherwise have done. It's not clear
to me from what I read about the case that this learning disabled boy
did anything more than submit to the unrelenting pressure of an older,
and seemingly more sophisticated "classmate," in this case an
undercover cop.

The Snodgrass family has filed a novel lawsuit against the school
district. They sent their son to school to get an education, not to be
duped by a cop into making a minor narcotic purchase. They are
claiming that the school district breached its duty to provide a
special needs student with the educational tools he needed to succeed.
Instead of educating their son, the school permitted undercover cops
to patrol the halls looking to score drugs.

"Sending police and informants to entrap high school students is
sick," says Tony Newman of the Drug Policy Alliance, a drug-law reform
organization.

The use of police officers masquerading as something they are not is
also common in sex crimes. There is actually a special unit of police
officers in Connecticut skilled at pretending to be 14-year-old girls.
Their task is to get men to commit to a licentious assignation, so
that the men can be arrested for sex crimes. I can't imagine how an
officer so employed responds to his wife's question upon arriving at
home after a tough day behind the computer screen. "How was your day,
honey?" What does the cop say, honestly?

Of course, the safest course is never to break the law. But just how
serious an offense is it for a high school kid to buy $20 worth of
marijuana?

Times have changed. I suspect that even former President Bill Clinton
would now admit that he did more than inhale. Sadly, drug prosecutions
in high schools and junior high schools around the country appear to
target low-income schools. These schools are too often viewed as the
entry point in a school-to-prison pipeline. When's the last time you
read about an undercover investigation of narcotics use and sales at
an exclusive prep school, such as New Haven's Hopkins School?

Entrapment remains a risky defense for someone accused of a crime. It
rarely succeeds. I suspect most jurors enter a courtroom less
concerned with the presumption of innocence than waiting to be shown
what the arrested man or woman has done wrong. Police and prosecutors
know this. Hence, undercover cops in our schools persuading the
learning disabled to engage in misconduct.

We get the government we deserve. Don't we deserve better?
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MAP posted-by: Matt