Decoy

" Decoy letters " are, ordinarily, letters prepared and mailed for the purpose of detecting criminals. It is no objection to a conviction upon evidence produced by means of a decoy letter that the prohibited act was discovered by such a letter addressed to a person who had no actual existence. There is a class of cases in respect to larceny and robbery in which it is held that when one person procures, or originally induces, the commission of the act the doer cannot be convicted -because the taking was not against the will of the owner. Many frauds upon the postal, 1 L. declarare, to make clear. ^Knecht V. Mutual Life Ins. Co., 90 Pa. 121 (1879), Paxson, J. > Bassett v. Denn, 17 N. J. L. 433 (1840).

4Crabtree v. State, 1 Lea, 270 (1878).

120 U. S. 488 (1887). revenue, and other laws, can effectually be discovered only by means of decoys." Where the guilty intent to commit crime hag been formed^ any one may furnish opportunities or even lend assistance to the criminal, to expose him... But no court will countenance a violation of positive law or contrivances for inducing a person to commit a crime.2 Exceptions to the principle exist in two cases: (1) Where it is a condition to an,offense that it should be " against the will " of the party injured, as in prosecutions for rape, highway robbery, and assaults not offenses against the public peace, there must be an acquittal when it appears that the party alleged to be Injured invited the commission of the offense. (2) Where there are physical conditions of an offense inconsistent with a trap, so that these conditions cannot exist where there is a tjrap, the defendant must be acquitted; as when the door of a house is opened by its owner to give a burglar entrance.

Judge Benedict, in Urdted States v. Bott, 11 Blatch.

848 (1873), and Judge Drummond, in Bates v. United ' States, 10 F. E. 92 (1881), decided that it is no defense to an indictment under Eevised Statutes, sec. 3993 (act of July 13, 1876), for sending an obscene book by mail, that the book was sent to a detective who gave a fictitious name. Contra, United States v. Wliittier, supra. 3 A " decoy " or " test " letter should get into the mail in some of the ordinary ways provided by the postal authorities, and as part of the " mail matter.'! '