FBI's “imperfect entrapment” of teen may lead to FAA challenge

You're seeing an interaction between two rather unintuitive rules.

Standing is required because legislature is supposed to make the law, not the courts. The courts only "make law" when they're forced to because there is already a "case or controversy" and it has to be decided under the law in effect when the events occurred, not whatever Congress might decide to pass tomorrow. Only then do the courts decide what the ambiguous, vague, contradictory text Congress passed actually means. Then that decision stands as precedent and effectively becomes the law until the legislature disagrees in the form of passing contrary legislation (or a constitutional amendment).

But the thing you're really objecting to is the exclusionary rule. Letting bad people go free is the mechanism by which the exclusionary rule operates, because it's something the police don't want, which means it can be used as punishment for the police when they break the rules.

The exclusionary rule is weird. When you see it in operation your instinct is to think that something is malfunctioning, but that's how it's supposed to work. You think it isn't working because you want the same thing as the police and its method of operation is to do something the police don't want.

The problem is the exclusionary rule does what it's designed to do surprisingly well in practice, and the alternatives don't.

Based on the article, it seems to me that he almost certainly would not have. He appears to be naive, gullible, and latching on to one thing or other for direction. When placed on a perfectly set up stage for doing something horrible, he did it. But without that perfect stage, what would he have done? He's clearly not a "good person", and could definitely be described as "immoral". But it's not clear to me that he's a criminal and deserves jail time. It seems like he didn't meet the requirements for an entrapment defense, at least according to the jury. But it still seems very close to entrapment: he's essentially being punished for a a tendency or a willingness to do horrible things, even if he would never have done them without specific encouragement.

Given the events in the article, if he had these feelings on or before the moment was contacted by FBI Special Agent Jason Dodd agent posing as the recent convert Bill Smith, then I agree the FBI had the responsibility to pursue him. However, if not, the FBI entrapped Mohamud. (why? read on)

The article goes into detail about Mohamud's upbringing. I'm going to take a few quotes from it: - 'Like many refugee children, Mohamud had to deal with cultural barriers that separated him from his parents, his American friends, and his mostly white classmates. There is little question he felt different. For an issue of the class magazine, for example, Duncan asked his students to draw cartoons of themselves and caption them. Under his portrait, Mohamud wrote, “I’m the black one.”'

- 'Mohamud’s friends from that time acknowledged he was easy to influence'

- “Home was kind of a hostile environment for him,” [re: his parents breakup who subsequently divorced]

- '“manipulable” and “conflicted”' [the words in double quotes are those as written in an email by FBI Special Agent DeLong to other FBI agents in 2009]

- '“shy around authority figures.”'

When you take someone like that and make them the target of a sting operation...

I'm just not going to finish my sentence.

Not only that, here is another (lengthy) quote:

The public record of that meeting is incomplete. In what the FBI claimed was an honest mistake, Youssef’s tape recorder had dead batteries. Apart from the anonymous agent’s testimony, the only source for what Mohamud said that day is a summarized report prepared by Chan. At trial, Chan said he had destroyed his original notes.

(The defense took great issue with this at trial. Entrapment law requires prosecutors to show that a defendant was predisposed to commit the crime before the first contact with government agents. The nuances of Mohamud’s behavior and language during the first meeting, the defense argued, were vital.)

The FBI do not have a checklist that involves checking the batteries of any electronic devices to be used in an operation prior to operation.

Edit: spacing

It still seems like there's a need for a different funding model. But it's interesting that one still hasn't emerged, given that the erosion of the old one has gone as far as it has.