Why, you simple creatures, the weakest of all weak things is a virtue which has not been tested in the fire.
—Mark Twain, The Man
That Corrupted Hadleyburg
Like the mysterious stranger in Mark Twain's tale, the FBI brought a bag of gold to tempt politicians. Did those who fell for the Abscam sting have only themselves to blame or can they, like Hadleyburg, blame the stranger for leading them astray? This question lies at the heart of the uproar over the tactics used to catch public officials in the act of allegedly taking a bribe. Did they willingly commit a crime, if indeed a crime was committed, since the charges have not yet been filed? Or were they tricked into wrongdoing by a Government con game that took unfair advantage of them? At stake is the integrity not only of numerous Congressmen, but also to a degree the reconstituted FBI and federal law enforcement in general.
As the FBI has moved away from the routine investigations of bank robbery and car theft that were popular under J. Edgar Hoover, it has plunged into the far more complex world of organized and white-collar crime and corrupt politicians. Evidence is much harder to obtain, cases that will stand up in court are much harder to build. So the agency has increasingly resorted to stings to produce the strongest possible proof of a crime. But police infiltration of the criminal world has always been a touchy area. Undercover agents often necessarily become parties to the commission of crime; so do paid informants. Most police experts believe that they would be severely handicapped without such methods, but the methods always carry the danger of abuse.
The sting is embodied in American law as an acceptable police device. In a 1973 decision, the U.S. Supreme Court recognized that infiltration by undercover agents is "one of the only practicable means of detection" in certain kinds of crime, notably drug transactions. In general, the court has ruled that as long as a defendant is "predisposed" to commit a crime, he cannot plead entrapment—that he was lured into breaking the law against his will or without his knowledge. An entrapment plea can be successful only if a law-enforcement agency has pressured or induced him to commit the crime. Thus the defendant must demonstrate that he would not have broken the law without the urging of the Government. Many defendants plead entrapment, but few win acquittal on that basis.