Where a plain clothes officers had invited a taxi driver to take them to a destination in breach of his licence without disclosing their identity, and he did so willingly, their evidence was not to be excluded as that of an agent provocateur. Despite the Human Rights Convention and Act, the position in England remains substantially the same, as to the presence or otherwise of pressure on the defendant to commit the act, and the effect on the fairness of the hearing by the admission or exclusion of evidence.
Lord Bingham of Cornhill CJ suggested the test as: ‘On the one hand it has been recognised as deeply offensive to ordinary notions of fairness if a defendant were to be convicted and punished for committing a crime which he only committed because he had been incited, instigated, persuaded, pressurised or wheedled into committing it by a law enforcement officer. On the other hand it has been recognised that law enforcement agencies have a general duty to the public to enforce the law and it has been regarded as unobjectionable if a law enforcement officer gives a defendant an opportunity to break the law, of which the defendant freely takes advantage, in circumstances where it appears that the defendant would have behaved in the same way if the opportunity had been offered by anyone else.’
Judges:
Lord Bingham of Cornhill CJ
Citations:
Times 02-Dec-1999, [2000] 1 WLR 1071
Statutes:
Police and Criminal Evidence Act 1984 78, European Convention on Human Rights
Cited by:
Cited – Regina v Looseley (orse Loosely); Attorney General’s Reference No 3 of 2000 HL 25-Oct-2001
Police Entrapment is no defence to Criminal Act
The defendant complained of his conviction for supplying controlled drugs, saying that the undercover police officer had requested him to make the supply.
Held: It was an abuse of process for the police to go so far as to incite a crime.
Cited – Regina v Moon CACD 10-Nov-2004
The defendant, a heroin addict said that the encouragement of a police officer to supply her with a small quantity of heroin amounted to entrapment and that her prosecution should have been stayed as an abuse of process. The officer had been . .
Lists of cited by and citing cases may be incomplete.
Criminal Evidence, Human Rights
Updated: 09 April 2022; Ref: scu.84372