GUEST,Folk le asked:

issn't it classed as entrapment if you leave your front door open and encourage burgulars?

A firm, unequivocal yes and no!

Start with the fact that there is nothing wrong with entrapment as such, contrary to popular opinion! The world is full of traps. Police and sometimes business employers lay traps from time to time, and they are well within both their rights and ethics and legality if the circumstances are right.

It's only illegal, and a defense to a charge of burglary, when police, say, purposely set things up to suggest or lure into committing a crime someone who would not have done such an illegal or wrongful act if the lure of the trap and the suggestion to take it were not dangled under their nose. Note the word "purposely".

If a householder negligently leaves a house unlocked and an innocent teenager, we'll say, realizes there's no lock and burglarizes the house, then I suppose you could say he's fallen into a trap, but it's not illegal entrapment. Even if the householder purposely was tempting someone he thought to be dishonest, makes no difference if the householder is not an agent of the state.   

What it amounts to is that agents of the state (the police or a "cooperating individual" at the instance of the police) may not affirmatively lure someone into doing a criminal act and then have the state complain of the thief's action.   

If the police entrap someone into a doing a drug deal, it may be perfectly legal to charge that dealer, but then again it may not. Does his known history and actions known to the police show that he was already interested in acting as a go-between, a drug broker if you will, just waiting for the opportunity? If the police agent's trap is set up so that the would-be dealer initiates the deal, it's legal entrapment. Does the state have probable cause to lay the trap?

You (or the lawyer for that defendant at trial) may ask, "But who is to decide whether there was the preexisting desire in the defendant's mind?" And the answer is, "The fact-finder at trial, the judge or jury as the case may be," based not on speculation but on facts shown to have been known to the police beforehand. That's part of the state's burden of proof.   

But merely providing an opportunity, (whether consciously or negligently, as in your question), for an aspiring criminal to sneak into an unlocked house and steal is not illegal entrapment.

And one more comment: There may well be severe criticism justified against a negligent or even malevolent householder as in your question, but if he's not an agent of the state it's not a defense.

Dave Oesterreich