Opinion ID: 1283191
Heading Depth: 1
Heading Rank: 1

Heading: Addendum Re Dissent

Text: We certainly agree with our respected brother Steffen's admission that he threads a very fine needle in contrasting his dissent today with his concurring vote in Oliver and Moreland. We also agree with our brother's candid acknowledgment that it is fair to say the essential differences between Oliver and Moreland and the instant case relate only to Hawkins' attire and the placement of the currency openly tendered as bait. We further agree that, in a judicial system committed to the principle of stare decisis, [i]t is admittedly troubling to attempt to distinguish the instant case from the other two on such gossamer grounds. We disagree, however, with our brother Steffen's newly adopted perception that this Court should not substitute its wisdom for the policy choices of a young prosecutor and a few youthful officers, who have tried to formulate and justify an attempt to evade our prior rulings. The policy choice of whether the resources of the Nevada courts and related services should be expended on manufactured crime  to punish vulnerable persons who have been duped, in the hope of frightening others who truly are social predators  does not in our opinion become vested in an attorney simply because he has landed a job as a district attorney's deputy. Nor does it become vested in police officers merely because they have survived the rigors of the local police academy. In our view, as laudable as they may be, such accomplishments do not establish prosecutors and police as the living embodiment of a separate, coordinate branch of government which possesses a vested power to define acceptable methodology for dealing with crime that is superior to this Court's authority to decide whether the already overtaxed resources of the Nevada court system should be expended to fight manufactured crime. In disputed cases, the executive branch does not define what constitutes real crime; the judiciary performs this function. We level no personal condemnation at the fine young people who conducted the decoy program now under examination. For healthy, energetic people in the prime of life  during balmy summer months when the sidewalks are warm  perhaps few pastimes could seem more enticing than to go fishing for suckers, like Hawkins, as decoy officers commonly speak of the dupes who succumb to their artificial bait. And, we fully understand that few such tyros will pause to weigh the social costs of entrapping young underclass males into manufactured crime, to-wit: (1) the loss to the entrapped person's employer of a trained, apparently acceptable employee, as was the case here; (2) the loss to society in general of the entrapped person's productivity; (3) the cost to society for the services of publicly paid prosecution and defense counsel, and support personnel; (4) the expenditure of the court system's time, in the justice's court, the district court, the supreme court, and in several stages of post-conviction proceedings in the state and federal courts; (5) the overhead cost of imprisoning a person who previously was self-supporting, at an annual expenditure in the neighborhood of $14,000 per year; (6) the lost use of a prison cell with a replacement value of perhaps $60,000 (generating what economists call an opportunity cost of an additional number of thousands of dollars per year), which might otherwise be used to incarcerate a real criminal; (7) the cost to any family and dependents of the entrapped person, who lose their breadwinner because of a vagrant fortune that he was abroad on a warm night when young officers were out fishing for young blacks and other criminal types; and (8) finally, the cost to society of maintaining a larger-than-necessary parole and probation system in order to supervise entrapped persons after their release, even though no supervision would foreseeably have been necessary if the entrapped persons had been left in peace to begin with. We venture to say nothing about the prospect that, if such officers were not out fishing for crime-prone young blacks and other underclass males, they could utilize their energies discerning real crime elsewhere  surely with less certitude of success, but with much greater social utility. Nor will we attempt to quantify the probable social cost of making criminals and convicts out of productive persons, who may upon release never return to the ranks of the gainfully employed. In short, then, we do not agree with our respected brother Steffen that this Court should leave the abovementioned concerns to be assessed solely by the executive branch  as represented by the youthful prosecutor and officers who shaped the decoy operation with which we are concerned in the instant case. At least three more observations concerning other aspects of our brother's dissent should be made, to-wit: (1) Our brother Steffen suggests that, commonly, entrapment is determined as a matter of law only where there has been an active as opposed to passive tender of a criminal opportunity. As we see it, the doctrine of decisions in decoy cases from Florida and other jurisdictions, which we adopted in Oliver and Moreland, are not at odds with this view. Rather, they simply recognize that in situations like the instant one, in which police officers set out to tempt vulnerable people by blandishing valuables in circumstances communicating a message that the property may be taken without risk, there is indeed an active and unacceptable solicitation on the part of the police. (2) Our brother Steffen also says that he simply is unwilling to assume, on the basis of the record, that the officers were pursuing Hawkins because of his color. Of course, this majority opinion is not premised upon any finding of racial bias. Still, as we recall, in previous Nevada cases involving similar entrapment through decoys, the ensnared persons were black. Indeed, in the instant case, Hawkins, a black man, was arrested and prosecuted although the police immediately released his white companion  who arguably was equally implicated. Although our brother indicates he does not subscribe to what he calls racial overtones of our mentioning such phenomena, we continue to think that minority members of society may find several aspects of the record before us to be quite disconcerting. For example, minorities may strongly suspect, and quite possibly resent, that this kind of decoy operation proceeds according to a self-fulfilling prophecy that young blacks and other underclass males in the police profile, such as hispanics, are criminal types. As one of the police officers told the Grand Jury when explaining why the decoy team exposed the bait to Hawkins, while hiding it from three other persons they feared might take it: He fits the age, sex and race. [8] Thus, here, still another serious societal cost could result from sanctioning manufactured criminal prosecutions against blacks and any others whom young police officers viscerally sense to be within the profile of criminal types that they have targeted to be purged from free society. (3) Finally, our brother has attempted to distinguish this Court's decisions in Oliver and Moreland in ways which, we respectfully believe, cannot legitimately be recognized in a jurisprudential system contemplating only distinctions that are meaningful and comprehensible. In setting precedents to be applied by the trial courts, we believe the law must be kept stable and intelligible. We are unwilling, therefore, to join our brother in propounding a distinction declaring that  while the entrapment defense protected Oliver, a black who took ten dollars from an apparently impoverished black decoy in Las Vegas  the defense is now unavailable to Hawkins, a black who took $126.00 from a well-dressed, apparently affluent white decoy in Reno. Nor can we perceive any possibility of saying (as our brother Steffen also suggests) that the instant case is distinguishable from Oliver because the black entrapped in Oliver had perhaps rationalized his act by thinking he was protecting the decoy against further harm from liquor. Neither our decision, nor the record in Oliver, provides any basis whatever for making such a statement. Finally, we can see no basis for suggesting, as does our brother, that the prosecutor's claims about the supposed fears of Reno citizens, totally dehors the record, provide any basis for a meaningful distinction. [9] YOUNG and SPRINGER, JJ., concur.