Sting is legal

Sting is legal: "BY holding that a sting operation by any citizen is a legitimate exercise, Justice Shiv Narayan Dhingra of the Delhi High Court resolved, on September 24, a key dilemma of journalists intending to use sting as a means of exposing corruption. Justice Dhingra, in his order, quashed the charge sheet and the summons against two journalists, Aniruddha Bahal and Suhasini Raj, who had conducted a sting operation in 2005 against Members of Parliament (MPs) in order to expose their corrupt ways. The Delhi Police, instead of prosecuting the corrupt MPs, charged Bahal and Suhasini Raj under the Prevention of Corruption Act (PCA), for seeking to bribe the MPs.

A sting operation, by implication, involves a bargain to commit an offence by a public servant in exchange for monetary or other benefits so that the person who carries out the sting will be able to capture the offence on his or her camera by subterfuge. This raised the issue of invasion of the privacy of the official being exposed, but it was mostly justified in terms of the larger public interest involved if the public servant being exposed was predisposed to corruption, and if the sting operator had the larger public interest in mind. But the legal question of whether the sting operator might be guilty of abetment to the offence committed by the public servant remained to be resolved."