The entrapment argument

The sheik was fictitious; the money and undercover approaches came from the government. Those facts make the entrapment question reasonable. They do not by themselves answer it. In the ABSCAM appeals, the defense turned on inducement and the defendants’ readiness to commit the offenses, rather than simply on which side proposed the transaction. Courts examined recordings, conduct and testimony instead of treating the existence of a sting as a complete defense.[1][2]

In Kelly’s 1984 appeal, the court distinguished the government’s conduct from the defendant’s predisposition. It held that a jury could reject his explanation that he had taken the money to investigate suspicious people himself. That was a ruling about the evidence against Kelly, not a declaration that every large government inducement is legitimate.[2]

The Myers defendants also argued that they had been coached to make incriminating promises and did not really intend to deliver official favors. The court treated corruptly selling a promise as actionable even if the seller secretly planned to cheat the buyer. An official need not successfully change immigration law before a corrupt agreement can be prosecuted.[1]

This leaves a demanding reading task: identify the specific charged transaction, the official’s knowledge and the applicable defense. A short clip of cash establishes an important event; the surrounding record establishes what legal conclusions can follow.

Philadelphia council leaders Harry Jannotti and George Schwartz were convicted after accepting payments in a fictitious hotel-development scheme. Their trial judge set aside the verdicts on several grounds, including entrapment, due process and federal jurisdiction. The Third Circuit, sitting en banc, reversed and ordered the jury’s verdict reinstated in 1982.[1]

The majority reasoned that the jury could find predisposition and that an impossible-to-complete scheme could still support a conspiracy conviction. In its view, the trial court had taken disputed factual judgments away from the jury. The absence of a real hotel project did not erase an agreement to misuse public office.[1]

Judge Ruggero Aldisert dissented, with Judge Joseph Weis joining except for one part. Aldisert argued that the government had not proved predisposition sufficiently and warned that powerful investigators could create wrongdoing through pressure and extraordinary temptation. His objection was that judges had a responsibility to protect innocent people from manufactured criminal dispositions, not that public corruption should go unpunished.[1]

That dissent lost, but it matters to understanding ABSCAM. The legitimacy of the operation was argued seriously by federal judges. A balanced account can report that the controlling court sustained these convictions while explaining why other judges thought the line had been crossed. Neither the existence of a dissent nor the majority’s victory should be presented as unanimous moral approval.