Case file 0048

Dalia Dippolito: A Solicitation Case, Not a Completed Killing

The Florida appeal addressed entrapment and trial evidence while leaving the conviction intact.

Dalia Dippolito's case concerned a plan to have her husband killed, not a murder that had already occurred. A Florida appellate court's 2019 account begins with her lover approaching Boynton Beach Police in 2009 to report the plan. ^[S1]

A conviction followed by a retrial

An earlier conviction had been reversed over jury-selection problems. The later trial again produced a guilty verdict, and the judge imposed sixteen years in prison. In its substituted June 2019 opinion, the Fourth District Court of Appeal affirmed. ^[S1]

The reversal was therefore a stage in the litigation, not the final outcome. Reporting it without the retrial would leave the case unfinished at the wrong point.

What the appeal contested

Dippolito argued that police conduct amounted to objective entrapment. The court rejected that argument. It emphasized that the lover first approached police and that participation by the television program Cops came at arrest, after the solicitation had been completed. ^[S1]

The televised arrest and the criminal allegation became closely associated in public memory. The appeal nevertheless addressed a legal question about government conduct, rather than deciding whether television publicity alone made the accused guilty or innocent.

The offense matters

Solicitation concerns asking or arranging for a crime. Calling this a completed murder would invent a death. Calling the sting merely a television performance would disregard the conviction and appellate judgment.

The documented endpoint is a sustained conviction and sixteen-year sentence for the solicitation case. It can be explained without treating a staged notification scene as evidence that the intended victim was actually killed.