Hey, Cringe,

With regards to Mr. Vosburgh, the honeypot scheme is no different than having an undercover police officer posing as a prostitute walking a neighborhood park looking for johns who are known to traffic the area. It was a sting operation.

Did you know that there are other crimes such as attempted murder in which the crime hasn't been committed, perhaps, but the intent was there?

Child pornography is an absolutely heinous crime and I have no time for losers who prey on children in this way or take pleasure in it

Child pornography is absolutely a horrible crime. I'm a father. Enough said in that respect.

The thing I would say that distinguishes a single mouse click from approaching a prostitute is demonstrable intent. There is no law against talking to a prostitute. You must explicitly request the service. It makes me uncomfortable to think that a mouse-click alone could be enough enough to land you in jail for 4 years. I don't know the specific evidence cited in the trial. I would hope that there was more evidence indicating the person's intent that supports the guilty verdict.

You can mislead someone into clicking a link to something harmful. It's called phishing. It's also called entrapment.

I saw an episode of "Cops" one time, where a guy was driving home from work. The female undercover officer approached him at a stoplight, talked him into pulling over, and after several minutes, finally convinced him to take her up on her "services".He was dragged out of his car and handcuffed at that point.

The amount of resources being wasted on busting people who, very probably, pose no danger to society - is staggering.

My wife's uncle was with a group, INCLUDING HIS WIFE IN THE CAR, driving along. They saw a hooker and just joked around with her a minute or two, as if they might use her services, then laughed and drove off. Shortly he was arrested because the "hooker" was really an undercover agent.

Reminds me of a Cops episode I saw. Some guy was standing outside a bar after some alleged confrontation. An officer wandering around the parking lot later found a joint on the ground (nowhere near the guy). They were proud to report the guy was going to be charged with possession. Nothing in the video however tied him to the substance.

Did any of you read the CNET article? Although it has a definite slant, the facts are all there to see. Mr. Vosburgh did not just click on link leading to some pictures of "sub-18-year-olds cavorting in a hormonally induced fashion". He clicked on multiple links in the honeypot that purported to link to 4 year olds having sex with adults. I don't know about you, but I've never seen 4 year olds have hormonally induced sexual cravings.

Besides the links, they did find thumbnails of naked children and the man destroyed a hard drive and thumb drive before the FBI could get them. Something sounds very not innocent about this.

CHILD PORN IS HORRIBLE

Everyone gets involved with the details and misses the real point.

Entrapment, government spying on every aspect of our private lives and personal information has become an epidemic.

We're lazy because we've had it easy for so long. We think that history is meaninigless.

We have lost many of our freedoms and are losing more daily - and we can't recognize it and don't even care.

We have become a nation of stupid, frightened sheep. (my sincere apologies to sheep)

The remark about Orwell is right on.

Intending to commit a crime is as bad as commtting it. There was a case recently where a man sent an e-mail to a woman friend saying he was going to sexually assult another woman and her two-year-old daughter. She took the e-mail to the local police, who said they could do nothing because no crime had been committed. The jerk followed through on his threat. Now there is a two-year-old out there scarred for life because the police couldn't at least watch the house of this woman and her child for a while in case the guy was serious.

By the time a crime has been committed, 95% of the damage is already done. Many times it could be prevented. This "they haven't committed a crime yet" attitude is fostered by you folks who whine and complain about "stings" and hollar "entrapment" all the time.

Now, having said all that, I agree that sometimes the law is a little over-zealous and has too many times put an innocent person in prison. I personally would rather let a guilty person go than to lock up an innocent one. In this particular case, this guy was not innocent. If any of you who think he was wrongfully arrested have any children (or maybe a little sister), you'd better consider if you'd feel differently if he had tried to violate your loved one. If he had been caught before he could do anything, by your standards he should be let go. Do you really believe this?

If you need someone to blame, then blame the idiots out there who don't care about their fellow human beings and spoil it for the rest of us.

Maybe we need to become our "brother's" or "sister's" keepers. The police can't do all of the protection of all of us. Maybe we need to advertise when someone makes a threat like this and get neighbors involved in watching for the bad guys, especially the "nosy" neighbor kinds. Have them checking things out with their index finger on speed dial to 911. _We_ should be helping to save our neighbors, not leave the whole job to the police.

I cannot accept that intending to commit a crime is as bad as actually committing it. Sorry, but it just ain't so.

Imagine I want to kill you, and I go over to your place with an axe, fully intending to perform mayhem. Then I have a crisis of conscience and realize I can't go through with it. I go home feeling bad about myself.

Are you seriously telling me that I've committed murder? Are you dead? The answers are obvious.

I may have committed a crime, and I may have to do my thing with the justice (sorry, legal) system. However this scenario does not make me a murderer. Nor do I think that this setup is particularly artificial or contrived.

While the intent to commit a crime is itself a crime, it is not typically considered just as bad as the crime itself. The penalties are usually not as stiff, reflecting the fact that although it is criminal to decide affirmatively to commit a criminal act, the intended target is not truly victimized until the crime is actualized.

The key with intent crimes is deciding what constitutes evidence of intent. I might not consider a single click on a link to a purported child porn site to amount even to reasonable suspicion, which is required for an arrest. I might even overlook one or two clicks within the site, but once a honeypot visitor has crossed some arbitrary but fixed threshold, I would have to agree that reasonable suspicion is established, and an arrest and equipment seizure is warranted.

Should that be sufficient evidence also to convince a jury beyond a shadow of a doubt that the accused had the intent to receive criminally obscene material? I don't know. I think if I were on that jury, I'd need to see corroborating evidence from other sources. Partly because I've seen far too many episodes of Cops. I had to stop watching it because it was giving me far too cynical an attitude towards the men and women of law enforcement and their devotion to preserving the constitutional rights of the accused. Far too many of the officers portrayed on that show seem to have been absent from Cop School on the day they taught "Innocent Until Proven Guilty in a Court of Law."

How about sending a link to a tinyurl-hidden link which redirects to a site which URL is provocative but has no bad picture on it, like the one you described. Would that land you in jail?
How about clicking on an FBI honeypot URL which is hidden behind a random word on a webpage?

Brian, in your example you had a change of heart both before you committed the act and before you were caught in the carrying out of the act. Allowing someone to escape punishment just because they didn't complete the commission of their crime is like rewarding them for failure.

If, up until the point they were caught and stopped, their intentions had not changed, they should be subject to the penalty for committing the crime.

CoAX, remember the key word here - "intent". If a link is hidden behind something else, the users intent was obviously to click on what was visible. Actually, in this case the user who clicked on the hidden link might have a case against whoever placed it there - particularly if it led somewhere that got the user in trouble.

But Loerps, it's not a Boolean function. It's a scalar. Brian isn't arguing that no crime is committed if he stops short of actually committing the murder. He's saying that the crime of intending to commit murder is a less serious offense than the crime of actually doing so, and therefore should result in a less arduous sentence. (Brian, please correct me if I'm wrong.)

There are significant differences between intending to commit a crime, and actually committing it. Everyone who actually commits it has taken one step further than those who intend to, but then don't, for whatever reason. Every victim of an acted-out crime has incurred damages that the intended victims of intent-crimes have not. If we are going to abide by the time-honored practice of letting the punishment fit the crime, we must consider such things, and mete out penalties accordingly.

If the penalty for intending to do something is the same as the penalty for actually doing it, there's scant motivation to decide at the last moment not to do it after all.

Hiram, I see where you are coming from, but my point was in regards to a person who is caught in the act of attempting to commit a crime. In this case, had they not been stopped the crime would have been committed. In this case, in the mind of the person attempting to commit the crime there was no change of heart or direction. Their intent didn't change, neither did their mindset.

Relative to your last point, if they decide at the last minute not to commit the crime then they fall outside my example. I clearly referred to "a change of heart both before you committed the act and before you were caught in the carrying out of the act". Your example of a "change of heart" then doesn't apply, and, as you suggested, should have a lesser punishment. As a matter of fact, I'd go so far as to say that if a person has a change of heart before committing a crime then no punishment is necessary at all.

While everyone has a point, I interpreted the original point as: this has the potential for setting a precedent that we may not have thought through and might lead us where we do not want to be. Now, I know that if I check my internet browsing tracks, I see many sights, many pics, and lots of who knows what kind of trash in my browser cache. I wonder what I clicked on to get those. Persecuting someone for something that they MIGHT have done, or could have done, is a bad and dangerous flow of logic in the judicial system. If I seen a link worded as was described, it would probably grab my attention as well. For all we know, which is almost nothing, after the "honeypot" visit the man may have tried to get it off his computer not because he tried to get rid of criminal evidence, but maybe because his conscience led him to. Before anyone gets their feathers ruffled, I am not defending this guy. I just can't stand when I hear people rendering judgment based on emotions and without knowing all the facts. I also hate to know that I could be charged with "attempted piracy" simply because I clicked on a link saying "Free Music Downloads". It's all about setting a precedent for making it a crime to click certain links. What's next, arresting people based on the words used in web searches?!

It appears there's more agreement between us than I originally thought, Loerps, but I still think there are distinctions to be made between intending, attempting, and succeeding.

If someone has done me wrong, and I decide that he needs killin', and call my friend to tell him I've strapped on my legally purchased and licensed sidearm and I'm headed over to my nemesis's house to give him what he deserves, and my quick-thinking friend calls the police to give them a heads-up, they're going to catch me at one of possibly five points in the timeline:

1) While I'm walking toward the presumptive victim's home, legally carrying a loaded weapon. At this point, I have not actually committed violence against anyone, though I have formulated intent to do so, communicated that intent to someone else, and taken certain actions to actualize that intent.

2) While I'm standing in the presumptive victim's yard. At this point it could be argued that by stepping off the public sidewalk onto the fellow's private property, I have committed an act of trespassing, and have taken a further step toward making my expressed intent a reality.

3) After I have taken a shot at the intended victim, but missed. This would pretty obviously justify a charge of assault with intent to kill. At the very least, it's unlawful discharge of a firearm.

4) After I shot and wounded, but not actually killed my victim. This would be attempted murder.

5) After I have shot and killed my victim. At this point, a charge of first degree homicide would be pretty easy to stick on me.

You seem to be suggesting that no matter at which of these points the police stop me, they should be able to charge me with Murder I, and that my appropriate punishment should be the same, whether they stop me at point 1 or point 5.

I respectfully disagree. I would submit that the damage done to the victim and to society are far more grievous if I manage to get to point 4 or 5 before the police intervene than if I'm stopped at points 1 or 2. As I've said, at point 1, I'm not even sure a crime has been committed. At point 2, some legal line has been crossed, but I'm not sure whether that's a misdemeanor, a petty crime, or a high crime.

I think at any of these points, police have sufficient reason to make an arrest, and maybe even put me on a psych hold until it can be determined whether I maintain the intent to erase this person from the rolls of the living. But I simply cannot see how you can justify giving someone full-ride scholarship to State Pen on the basis of some passionate words spoken in anger without any objectively illegal activity being perpetrated.

Whether this illustration is truly applicable to a more nebulous crime like child pornography is left to the reader as an exercise.

Hiram - very well put.

Wow, we've deconstructed crime!

Sometimes I think I've been watching too much Law & Order. Still love that show though.

Hiram, I like your example, it is a good breakdown of the steps leading to a crime. Let's remember the two key concepts to consider (intent, and "in the act of committing...") and then look at your example further.

One of the keys is whether your "friend" calls the police or not. If he does, and you don't waver in your path to the murder, and they nab you at any point in your example, you are as dangerous to society as if you had succeeded.

If the police were not called by your friend, and your intent is not obvious at the point at which they nab you, then they have no grounds for establishing your intent and could charge you only with any crime you had already committed.

If, at any point along the path you describe, you change your mind and decide to leave your intended target alone, you are guilty of nothing but a bad idea - and that's not a crime.

In the original story, the guy was stopped after leaving a trail and while actively pursuing his goal. Therefore, he should be charged as if he had succeeded.

Not every case is the same, and seldom is it cut and dried. I'm just saying that where intent is obvious based on current activity and/or stated intent, and the person is caught in the act of pursuing his/her intended crime, the charge should be the same as if they had succeeded in committing the crime.

There is no sense in coddling those fully capable, willing, and in the act of committing a crime at the expense of the victim simply because the perpretator was stopped before they could do irreparable damage.