Defendant Should Not Have Been Coerced Into Giving Up Entrapment Defense

Friday, April 17, 2026

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Defendant Should Not Have Been Coerced Into Giving Up Entrapment Defense—C.A.

By a MetNews Staff Writer

A defendant who was convicted of exchanging sexually explicit electronic messages with someone he thought was a 13-year-old girl—but was actually a vice detective—was wrongfully put to the choice of waiving his entrapment defense or having his conviction of a sex offense 50 years earlier brought up, Div. Three of the Fourth District Court of Appeal held yesterday.

The opinion reverses the 2020 conviction of Jan Curtis Harzan but, Justice Martha K. Gooding wrote, “[b]ecause the evidence was legally sufficient to support the jury’s verdict, there is no bar to retrial.”

Orange Superior Court Judge Terri K. Flynn-Peister “prejudicially violated Harzan’s constitutional rights by requiring him to give up his entrapment defense in order to keep his prior sexual misconduct out of evidence,” Gooding said.

Trial Court Rulings

Initially, Flynn-Peister ruled that the prior conviction was not admissible under Evidence Code §1108 as showing a propensity to commit conduct of the sort that was charged because what he did as a teenager was of a different nature. She also found that the prejudicial nature of the evidence would outweigh its value, in violation of §352.

However, she found, if Harzan proceeded to raise an entrapment defense, the prosecution would “then have the burden of proving the defendant was not entrapped,” and the prior offense would be relevant.

The defendant’s lawyer said:

“I am not requesting the entrapment instruction in order to avoid the possibility of the introduction of these other actions as a bootstrap way to get into the prior conduct.”

Misunderstanding of Entrapment

Gooding said that Flynn-Peister labored under a “legal misunderstanding of the entrapment defense,” adding:

“ Because Harzan should never have been put to that choice, we reject the Attorney General’s claim that he voluntarily surrendered his right to present an entrapment defense.”

She explained:

“[E]ntrapment turns on whether the police conduct at issue would have caused a normally law-abiding person to commit the charged offenses; it does not depend on what the particular defendant was thinking when he committed the acts in question.”

Accordingly, she said that “Harzan’s subjective state of mind” was not relevant to whether Huntington Beach Vice Detective Joseph Baugh’s actions in communicating with the defendant “would cause a normally law-abiding person to commit the offenses at issue here.”

The case is People v. Harzan, 2026 S.O.S. 1056.