“The Unjustified Operation Sting’s Excesses,
Its effects, consequences, possible aftereffects and
Suggestions to cub future occurrences.
– A case study of Army veteran Edwin Gennette in the Operation Blue Shepherd”
Olusegun M. Salako
ITT Technical Institute, Hanover

Abstract
With reference to an online publication on the story of a certain Army veteran and a series of other sources of materials (online, in prints and also by employing empirical interviews and findings), that describe the minds of criminals and the procedures of the police sting operations, especially in the Pensacola area of Escambia County in Florida, USA — dubbed Operation Blue Shepherd, this research work expatiates the effects, consequences and possible aftereffects of this operations when these operations’ tactics cross the line to publicly and unjustly tag unintended victims of their online traps, sex offenders. This paper is also aimed at highlighting the different effects of verdicts of punishment on a culprit and on an innocent victim of poor investigations. This work proffers a solution in the form of suggestions to the cases of genuinely debatable arrests of entrapped individuals with obviously legal intentions as in the case of Army veteran Edwin Gennette. Operation Sting should not pressure their temptation tactics on unintended innocent victims, with the use of legal baits, in order to get them to err.
Keywords: pressured temptation tactics, minds of criminals

Intercepting, apprehending and revealing the identities of sex offenders to the general public is most welcomed when absolute fairness is thrown into the operation by recognizing in all sincerity, an individual’s initial and sole intent as he or she walks into the online traps set by the police on dating sites and not tempting an ‘un-premeditating’ online ‘legal fun seeker’ with the good fruit so he can be caught also around the bad one; given the gravity of the consequences this operation can have on an unfortunate person’s life, in virtually all ramifications of it. Rephrasing this in order not to be misunderstood, punishing premeditated sex offenders is highly endorsed by the intent of this work and undoubtedly by any sane-minded person in any civilized community and this paper supports this a hundred percent. The major message this work is getting across is a call to the operation sting’s operatives to devise tactics that will pinpoint predetermined sex offenders and not seek to lure a ‘crime-clueless’ fun seeker into a sex offence. The case of Army veteran Gennette is peculiarly controversial in that, if any judge should analyze what initial intention of Gennette was, he would, in all fairness, be qualified as a common fun seeker and not a predetermined sex offender. If anybody was the criminal in the Gennette’s story, it was the older sister bringing up her underage sister into the discussion when Gennette was clearly not interested. From the account it was seen that she used herself as bait to tempt Gennette to own up to satisfying her wants. The older sister in this situation made, about, all the incriminating suggestions and in reality this older sister is the mind of an operation sting’s agent. This, to any just reasoning, is not fair. What any sane school of thought would expect from this team from the law enforcement is to go after predetermined sex offender by clearly putting up posts that will state that the interested party on the dating site is a minor. With this the issue of temptation and luring people, who have their eyes on the legal baits posed, will be eradicated. Tempting a predetermined sex offender with a clearly stated underage party’s post is thus very reasonable and an arrest as a result of this will be highly justified.
The Effects and consequences of injustice on a self-convinced innocent person.
Research shows that guilty people in most cases see the punishment allotted to them as what they deserve and thus welcome such verdict emotionally. In the other sense, when punishments are accorded to innocent unfortunate individuals, either due to injustice as a result of poor investigation by law enforcement or misjudgment on the part of the court, a devastating emotional damage is caused to the person depending on the weight of the punishment. In the case where the punishment involves public humiliation, such individual might not be able to get over it and such people end up mentally degraded and thus psychological issues. Such people draw away from socially inclined activities and end up in isolation. When a person receives unfair treatment like this, alienation arises due to social stigmatization, the effects can be detrimental. Social stigmas are defined as any aspect of an individual’s identity that is devalued in a social context.
Another main issue that can arise from unjust public humiliation is that the individual feels as though they are not being true to themselves, which can create an inner sense of turmoil and lead to psychological strain for the person hiding their identity. Additionally, fears associated with revealing one’s invisible stigma have been shown to lead to a myriad of negative consequences. These effects leading to these consequences can play out to have a fatal aftereffect in one of the following senses: “suicide or creation of a maniac.” According the Gennette’s account, he stated that he was only fortunate to have been helped by friends and family who analyzed his case and saw reasons with him that he was not to blame. He went further to confirm the effects of such humiliation on other individuals also arrested in the same operation.
Gennette’s quotes reviewed in an interwiew with the blog post’s reporter: "As soon as the word was out and the media reported the story, my life was destroyed," Gennette told me this month, describing those early days. "To say I struggled, and still am, is an understatement, and I found myself practically homeless a few times." Several Florida men charged in similar online stings have killed themselves after their arrests, but Gennette said that he found support from family and friends who "were completely supportive once I explained to them the truth."
While some people will kill themselves in suicide, monsters might be born in others. We hear of some gunmen who have engage in mass murder/suicide of innocent people and themselves because they have experienced one form of hurt or another. Who can really understand the minds of some of these criminals? Though, no material was cited and collected in this work stating a particular maniac born out of the consequences of a believed injustice from operation sting, but the possibility of creating one might be lurking and not farfetched. In a bid to systematically enquire the practice of this operation in the DMV (District of Columbia, Maryland and Virginia) area, a personal experiment was carried out on some dateline chats and this revealed a first cynical message stating they were two sisters interested in a date. Another one spoken with in another research experiment stated she would welcome the caller but that she had a thirteen year old daughter that was also pretty. These were instantly suspected as stings. These also indicated that the wrong tactics of using ‘legal baits’ in the form of older sisters or mothers as in the above cases is still ongoing. This is not acceptable.
In conclusion, The fact that, from the records in the blog post, some apprehended victims of the sting operations won their cases against the operation’s conductors goes a long way to say that the tactics highlighted above and used by the operation is not 100% justifiable to conclude victims are sex offenders. The suggestion by this work is that the predetermined sex offenders are the ones who deserve the punishments of eternal humiliation and other judgments served and that operation sting’s traps (dateline messages) to get them should be structured to have come from an underage individual and not introduced by an adult who welcomes the chat request and uses the minor on the sidekick also interested in the outcome of the chatting.

References * Goffman, E (1963). Stigma. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall. * Leary K (1999). "Passing, posing, and "keeping it real” Constellations 6: 85–96. * Nate Anderson – (Oct 13 2013, 6:00pm PDT). “Entrapped! When Craigslist predator stings go too far” (http://www.arstechnica.com/ tech-policy/2013/10/entrapped-when-craigslist-predator-stings-go-too-far) * Segev Re’em (Winter 2014, Vol. 64 Issue 1, p36-63. 28p). “Moral rightness and the significance of law: Why, how, and when mistake of law matters”.