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Comment by archontes | Hacker News Reader

"The four charges against Wingenroth stemmed from a December sting operation by the Pennsylvania Game Commission in which an officer called Wingenroth pretending to be a hunter who had wounded a deer and needed help recovering it."

"Entrapment is a complete defense to a criminal charge, on the theory that 'Government agents may not originate a criminal design, implant in an innocent person's mind the disposition to commit a criminal act, and then induce commission of the crime so that the Government may prosecute.'" - Justice.gov

The only way this doesn't look like entrapment to me is if the agent called the man and said, "Hey I wounded a deer, can you help?" and the man replied, "I'll use my drone!" Even then, I seriously wonder how this doesn't stray into the territory of implanting the disposition to commit said crime.

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You are misunderstanding entrapment the way people always misunderstand it. If you offer a service (on the low) to do something illegal, and law enforcement calls you pretending to be a legitimate user of your service, that is not entrapment.

Entrapment is when law enforcement coerces you into taking an illegal action that you otherwise would not have taken. I.E. A federal agent telling you that if you don't walk into that bank and rob it, they will arrest you for (a planted) firearms possession.

This case is about whether the defendants actions actually were illegal, because PA law seems ambiguous about it.

Was the drone operator offering a drone hunting service or just a dude with a drone that they called?

Based on his Instagram, this is a regular service he offers for deer recovery. It doesn't really matter though, it's the operators responsibility to know the law. If you are going to operate a drone for the purposes of hunting, common sense would dictate Googling the legality of doing so, since both airspace and hunting are generally heavily regulated. Upon finding ambiguity, I would probably opt not to do that kind of work or accept the potential for consequences.

"We have held that 'persuasion or mild coercion' and 'pleas based on need, sympathy, or friendship' constitute sufficient inducement to permit jury consideration of the entrapment issue." - United States vs. Nations

Need, sympathy or friendship. I think it's trivial to allow that finding a wounded animal would constitute a sympathetic plea.

It's the predisposition that gets him here. Given that he advertises the service, he's obviously predisposed to the action.

Sure, if the game wardens were maliciously trying to arrest a person who does real estate drone footage for kicks, then yes, a jury would probably hold that it was entrapment. Luckily most law enforcement isn't that comically evil or bored, and most of these situations are legitimate law enforcement actions.

The guy publicly posts that he does this to Instagram. https://www.instagram.com/p/CyolA3-pYJH/

(In case it gets deleted: a photo of a dead deer, from October 20 2023, with the caption: "We were happy to help Nate locate his personal best buck. The roller coaster of emotions is hard to explain, but the end result of this story was awesome to share. Congratulations, Nate! #wingydroneservices #from400above #drone #dronedeer")

Given they claimed to be hunters, not officials, I'm fairly sure you're not right (though I'm not a US lawyer).

To give a simile example to show why I think this: if someone calls me up and says "I don't like a person and wish I never had to see them again, please shoot them dead" vs. them calling me saying "I don't like a person and wish I never had to see them again" and me thinking on my own and shooting them dead - either way, I'm choosing to do something illegal, and I haven't been asked to do it by anyone I have reason to believe has the authority to let me legally murder someone. My shooting the person would, rightly, be illegal and not entrapment even if the person pretending to be my friend on the phone actually was a police officer.

This seems to be what happens when your police run out of actual crime: Do whatever it takes to find more. If you have to walk this close up to the "entrapment" line just to find someone you can arrest, are you really providing the public with a valuable service? I wonder what taxpayers think about this. I think whether it's tEcHnIcAlLy entrapment or not is not really the issue--the issue is bored cops scraping the bottom of the barrel.

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