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Simple English definitions for legal terms
decoy
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A quick definition of decoy:
A decoy is when someone tricks another person into doing something they wouldn't normally do. This can happen when a bad person pretends to be someone else to get someone to do something they shouldn't, or when a police officer tricks a bad person into committing a crime so they can be arrested. Sometimes, if the police trick someone into doing a worse crime than they were planning, it's called "sentencing entrapment."
A more thorough explanation:
Decoy (verb) is a slang term that means to trick or lure someone into doing something without using force. For example, if someone is decoyed out of their home, it means they were tricked into leaving their home without realizing it. Another example is when someone is decoyed into a county and then served with legal papers.
Decoying is similar to entrapment, which is when a law enforcement officer or government agent induces a person to commit a crime through fraud or undue persuasion. Entrapment is illegal, but decoying is not necessarily illegal.
- A con artist decoyed the elderly woman out of her life savings by pretending to be a charity worker.
- The police decoyed the suspect into a trap by pretending to be a buyer of stolen goods.
In both examples, someone was tricked into doing something they wouldn't have done otherwise. The first example shows how decoying can be used for criminal purposes, while the second example shows how it can be used by law enforcement to catch criminals.