Lantana man allegedly sold over 40 gallons of moonshine to state agents

[Graham2001]

Got moonshine?

Daniel David Pawa did, according to state alcohol agents. Over 40 gallons of the stuff.

http://www.sun-sentinel.com/news/pal...366,full.story

[rockland6674]

What a waste of perfectly good drinkable hooch.

[Singing in the Drizzle]

Over 40 gallons as they investigated the operation over several weeks.

What is was surprising is this was only the second arrest for moonshine in the last 12 months. So was this second person also stupid enough to advertise their illegal activities on Craigslist.

[fitz1980]

Originally Posted by Singing in the Drizzle

So was this second person also stupid enough to advertise their illegal activities on Craigslist.

The way I read it the moonshiner responded to an ad that the agents put on Craigslist in which they posed as guys looking to buy moonshine.

The agents met with the accused hooch supplier after posting an ad to Craigslist on Nov. 13 that was simply headlined, 'Moonshine?'

In the ad, an undercover agent called on whoever had the "strong stuff" to shoot him a text.

To my reading that also sounds like entrapment.

But since they placed a blind ad and than he reached out to them through text message that could change things in a legal sense. I'm really not sure how that works in the court's eyes.

[diddy]

If they (the moonshiners) committed the act without enticement from law enforcement - in other words, on their own free will, I doubt it is entrapment. For one, the moonshiners likely didn't know the buyers are cops until arrest, and I bet that these guys were making the stuff on their own without the cops asking them - since the cops had been watching them.

It doesn't sound much different than a vice squad or a narc squad watching certain drug dealers and then setting up a buy to arrest them with a bigger crime. The cops were just asking for stuff It's like trying to get a dealer to admit if he has cocaine. The only thing that is different here is that they did it through craigslist. The moonshiners were just dumb enough to reply to the ad. It reminds me of the cops running fake raffles so that criminals can walk into the police station and get arrested.

Remember, undercover operations are not entrapment when the criminal party is already breaking the law in the first place. THe ad is worded in such a way in that they are not asking people to produce it. Just that they have it already meaning they already produced it.

[Wintermute]

It's not even close to entrapment. There is nothing at all that even smells slightly of entrapment.

A normal law abiding citizen would not look at the ad and say, "Gosh I need to violate the law for this!".

Setting up a sting is legal. The vice squads do it all the time.

[Richard W]

I'm not sure that would even be entrapment in the UK, and we have stricter laws against it than you do. (I may be wrong - despite going on about this all the time, I don't really know anything about it...)

My understanding of the difference can be summed up by impulsive crimes. In the USA, if the police left a handbag sitting on a car seat with the window open, and somebody nicked it, then that would be a fine way to catch handbag thieves. In the UK it would be entrapment, because it's an opportunistic spur-of-the-moment crime and the crime itself wouldn't have been committed without the police operation.

Advertising for moonshine doesn't seem to breach either of those guidelines / laws. Presumably the guy who answered the ad was already illegally distilling moonshine, and just looking for customers. It's possible that in the UK, he could argue that he had never made moonshine before, and thought he'd run up a quick batch in response to the ad, but that would be easy enough to check on, and I assume it would count as a defence rather than as a reason not to charge in the first place.

As I said, though, I'm basically just making this up...

[diddy]

I don't think it matters so long as the actions were being done without duress of the police itself. SEtting out "bait cars" to catch thieves by leaving out attractive cars (with cameras and GPS devices hidden" are legal since the cops are not in the area. Heck Hooker stings are legal even if the hooker asks their client is a cop and they lie.

A cop asking people if they have moonshine seems totally legit since in order to make it you have to break the law to do that in the first place. They aren't saying who is buying said moonshine nor are they ordering people to make it (the ad had a question mark in the ad after all). I think the cops are in the clear since you cannot make or possess Moonshine in the first place and they were making a very passive request.