POLICE ENTRAPMENT A DIFFICULT LEGAL CONCEPT

Police receive an anonymous tip drugs are being sold on the 12th
floor of an apartment building in the Jane-Finch neighbourhood of Toronto.

Since drug trafficking is a problem in the area, they decide to investigate.

I suppose they could send a uniformed cop into the building. He could
get off on the 12th floor and ask anybody he sees whether there are
any drugs for sale.

Common sense tells me that would be a waste of time.

A better strategy would be to send in an undercover cop, which is what happens.

And when that undercover cop leaves the elevator and enters the 12th
floor along with another man, he bumps into one Aliu Imoro.

Without prompting, Imoro says "Hey, come with me."

"You can hook me up?" the cop replies.

"Yeah, man," Imoro responds.

Imoro then walks the cop and the other man to an apartment, enters
with a key and proceeds to give the other man some marijuana and asks
the cop what he needs. The cop replies "hard," which means crack cocaine.

Imoro says he only has "soft," meaning powder cocaine.

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Imoro sells the cop $40 worth of powder cocaine from a pre-packaged supply.

The next day, the undercover cop goes back and buys another $40 of
powder cocaine. Going by the book, police then obtain a search
warrant, search the apartment and seize 6.41 grams of cocaine, 550.05
grams of marijuana and the marked bills used by the cop to buy the cocaine.

Open-and-shut case, right? Guilty of various drug offences?

Not so fast.

Imoro argued the defence of entrapment.

Entrapment is an odd duck of a defence. It's used when someone has
committed an offence and is found guilty, but it prevents a
conviction from being entered on the basis the police or prosecution
conduct have crossed over a line into abusive conduct.

The trial judge in this case accepted the entrapment defence.

Here's her reasoning: the tip was anonymous and hadn't been
corroborated. The tip didn't point to Imoro.

The invitation to "come with me" wasn't an invitation to buy drugs.
The cop's "can you hook me up" query was the first reference to a
potential drug transaction.

Imoro wouldn't have let the cop into his apartment, or sold any
drugs, had the cop not initiated the transaction.

Hence, the acceptance of the entrapment defence and an acquittal.

Wait a minute, was the cop's conduct so outrageous that it crossed
the line into an abuse of process or was it normal investigative work?

By asking, "You can hook me up?" wasn't the cop conducting a proper
investigation? He was merely asking Imoro if there were drugs to be had.

It was a simple question. There was no persuasion or instigation to
engage in criminal conduct implied in the question.

Imoro wasn't turned into a criminal by police entrapment. He wasn't
randomly chosen off the street.

The cop had a reasonable basis to ask the question. Imoro was free to
do as he pleased. And what he was pleased to do was sell the cop some drugs.

And for that, he deserved to be convicted.

Judges are human and make mistakes. That's why we have an appeal
process. The appeal process worked. The prosecution appealed the
acquittal and, earlier this year, the Ontario Court of Appeal
reversed the acquittal, entered a conviction and sent the case back
for sentencing.

We don't want the police to manufacture crimes by entrapping innocent
people into committing crimes they would never have committed, but
for the entrapment.

Similarly, we don't want police to waste their time by randomly
investigating people.

But where police act in good faith, investigating a tip in a
high-crime area and have good reason to believe criminal activity is
taking place, there's nothing wrong with providing an opportunity to
commit an offence to someone already predisposed to do so.

That's not entrapment