yesterday somebody came to my dad's office and tried to sell me an imitation $700 sony camcorder for $200... it was sh*tty so i didn't even entertrain the sales pitch... anyways, my dad says to me that i should be careful of such things because he could be undercover, etc. My argument to that was "if i don't know that whatever he was selling was stolen, then I can't possibly get in trouble!

Is this ASSumption correct??

 

yep, no matter if you knew or not, if you buy something that is stolen, you will get arrested for receiving stolen property. i know a guy who had his bike stolen, a few months later he got a call from the PD that a guy had just purchased it and went to the police station to report the guy he bought it from, they arrested him (the buyer) and returned the property.

 

But they had to of dropped the charges against the buyer later?

 

Not that I know of, he did in fact receive stolen property. I would of thought, if you had suspicion, why buy the bike and do something about it later? Why not look into it first or report him prior to the purchase?

 

If the seller approached the buyer with a product , and the buyer agreed to purchase the item, there would be a strong case for entrapment I believe, if the buyer was subsequently arrested because the seller was a police undercover agent or somesuch.
There are fairly strict laws on what the Police etc can and cannot do, and offering an item for sale to a member of the public, and trying to arrest him for buying it, would not float, unless the item was an illegal substance etc. The buyer could even sue the police and may even win. Depends on the circumstances.

 

Shadow-- thats the logic i was trying to push on my father but he wasn't buying it...

thanks 4 all the input!!

 

Thats true... You can take a plea of entrapment in court and unless the judge is retarded (some are) you will get of scoth free

 

What the police can legally do to encourage someone to break the law so that they can then arrest them depends on the jurisdiction. It varies from country to country.

There is no such thing as "entrapment" in some jurisdictions.

 

this happened to my brother actually. he was in 8th grade and a kid stole a teachers CD wallet (400+ cd's) and my brother didnt know but he sold my brother a few of the cd's for like a dollar or two. Well the teacher found out that the kid stole from her and she pressed charges and my brother got charged with posession of stolen goods or whatever which was a felony, and the other kid got charged with stealing which was a misdemeanor! They dropped the charges, but its crazy that my brother would have been in more trouble than the kid that did the stealing.

I remember sitting at home and the cops showed up to search my brothers room for the cd's i was like OMG WTF!? cause i was like 14 and home alone and police are all over lol