If I had to come up with an equally just sting where the crime is attempted murder, it would go something like this:

Officer: “I’d love if you’d bring some chocolate ice cream to our date! By the way, I’m deathly allergic to chocolate.”

Rube Sting Target: “Allergic to chocolate? You’re joking, right?”

Officer: “What’s your cell number?”

...

Officer: “See you soon! Don’t forget to pick up that death by chocolate on the way!”

It's a good question, though one could argue that, if you fail to hurt a person there is no "murder victim", but there is an "attempted murder victim". If you actually make the attempt. If you only "plan" to murder someone, then never go attempt to go through with your plan, I don't believe you have committed a crime. You have the cross the line of taking direct action to initiate the action. Though if you plan with others, "conspiracy" to commit a crime is itself illegal, even if you don't take other action to act on it.

The plot loophole in Minority Report is that they could have just stayed near the victim to protect him/her and waited until the perpetrator actually crossed the line of making an attempt, and arrested the person for attempted murder. Forget the whole central dilemma of the movie.

Have you seen Derren Brown's "The Push"? Do you think the people there should be charged with attempted murder because they thought they were murdering someone?

I would argue that people should not be held responsible for their actions in contrived scenarios that are unlikely to actually occur organically. E.g. most of the guys charged here wouldn't actually have sex with a child, because in reality children don't look and talk like adults.

Sometimes it is.

There was a really sad case a couple years ago, where the FBI ran a sting on a schizophrenic teenager and convinced him to buy "explosives".

According to his mother, the kid was a disorganized schizophrenic, who could barely leave the house on his own.

If you ever watch some Terry Davis videos, you'll know that paranoia, and expression of pretty virulent racism, can be among the symptoms which schizophrenics suffer from.

I was pretty convinced that kid was unlikely to engage in terrorism if he hadn't met the FBI out on the Internet. Didn't seem like justice to me.

Dude, read the article? This is like a cop posing as a cow and trying to say on "slaughterYourCowToday.com": "Hey look, I am actually a real human being, please don't slaughter me"... But hey, the picture of that cow shows a freakin cow. Now the guy drives to the farm and is greeted by a fucking cow. He takes a gun and tries to shoot the cow. But the police rolls in and arrests him for attempted murder...

Yeah sounds like justice to you?