Legal Questions

I just read an interesting news item online in which a small town in Texas is upset with the way the NBC show, To Catch A Predator, was filmed there. Apparently, the taping lead to the suicide of a prosecutor from a nearby town and a bunch of protests from neighbors and other towns people over the show's concept. Even though some 30 people were arrested, the D.A. has decided not to press charges and is releasing all of those men who were caught.

I thought I was the only one disturbed by this show. While I am 125% behind the idea of throwing these bastards behind bars for life, I always thought the show set some questionable legal precedents. They might as well call the show Entrapment, even though it doesn't meet the legal definition as such. But, what next? What other crimes can we set people up for and then watch as they are arrested? Why send the COPS chasing after the bad guys when we can gurantee the ratings and the bad guys by bringing them to us? I've always been uncomfortable by this kind of justice and its potential abuses. And really, one airing of the NBC taping, and how are these guys ever going to get a fair trial?

It was with that in mind that I had a thought, but I'm not sure about several legal aspects of this thought. What if, as a professional s**t disturber, I went trolling on the internet to find the Catch A Predator lurkers? If I were to document such a search on the web so that I had definitive proof of what I was doing, what crimes would I actually be breaking? While I know its not right to pretend to be a pedophile in order to stop a TV show that pretends to be a pedophile victim, when it all came down to it, what laws would anyone be breaking if you showed up at the sting operation and they started to question you and you said, "Actually, Dateline, I'm so and so from ToStopDateline.com, and I'm here to bring your charade to a stop." Would you actually be breaking a law of contacting a child with the intent of doing pedophile acts if you knew all along that the person you were contacting was in fact only pretending to be a child? Would you be breaking any laws if you then showed up at this pretend child's house and walked into a sting operation, especially if the sting operation was being run by the television program and not the police?

I'm just curious. Since I can't possibly imagine wasting my time on such a project, no matter how much these shows irritate me, I would never entertain such a notion (besides, I'd make a terrible pretend pedophile ;). Still, this is the sort of hypothetical exercise that our world has been reduced to the more we let entertainment breach our everyday existence.

Personally, I'm waiting for the new FOX Reality Show, Mob Justice, where they lure a pedophile into a house and then turn the craze audience loose upon him. I've asked to be a member of the audience when the show airs. ;)