Opinion ID: 1992950
Heading Depth: 1
Heading Rank: 2

Heading: the reprehensible-conduct prong

Text: I agree with Justice BRICKLEY that the causation prong of the objective entrapment test  asking whether the police conduct, objectively speaking, is of the kind that would generally cause an average, hypothetical person to engage in criminal activity that such a person would not otherwise have engaged in  is, properly understood as I have discussed above, an important element of entrapment analysis. Many entrapment cases may appropriately be resolved by applying only the causation prong. That is, if the court finds that entrapment has occurred under that prong, there would be no need to carry the inquiry any further. For example, as I discuss in part II(A), Juillet may be resolved solely under that prong, as Justice BRICKLEY himself concludes. As I noted at the outset, however, I do not believe a purely mechanistic causation approach captures the full meaning of illegal entrapment. [T]he reprehensibility of police conduct cannot be defined solely by reference to the personality traits of a hypothetical law-abiding citizen. Jamieson, 436 Mich 95 (CAVANAGH, J., concurring). Rather, the fundamental principle is that `[n]o matter what the defendant's past record and present inclinations to criminality, or the depths to which he has sunk in the estimation of society, certain police conduct to ensnare him into further crime is not to be tolerated by an advanced society.' Russell, 411 US 437 (Douglas, J., joined by Brennan, J., dissenting), quoting Sherman, 356 US 382-383 (Frankfurter, J., joined by Douglas, Harlan, and Brennan, JJ., concurring in the result). Justice Douglas properly defined such intolerable conduct by noting that [law enforcement] agents play a debased role when they become the instigators of the crime, or partners in its commission, or the creative brain behind the illegal scheme. Russell, 411 US 439. I concluded in Jamieson that affording a person an opportunity to commit an offense does not ordinarily constitute entrapment unless (1) the circumstances indicate that such an opportunity would not normally be presented or (2) the mere furnishing of the opportunity requires the police to commit certain criminal, dangerous, or immoral acts. 436 Mich 95-96 (emphasis in original). The first prong of this test largely corresponds to the causation prong at the heart of Justice BRICKLEY'S analysis. The second prong reflects what I believe to be the broader reprehensible conduct prong of the objective entrapment test. Thus, there may well be cases in which, even though entrapment may not be established under a strictly causation-oriented approach, I might still conclude that illegal entrapment has occurred. II. APPLICATION TO JUILLET AND BROWN The two cases at issue here illustrate two different directions in which reprehensible police conduct may tend: (1) excessively zealous, extreme, immoral, and shocking tactics directed toward inducing a specifically selected target into criminal activity, and (2) excessively unsupervised and uncontrolled tactics directed toward randomly testing the virtue of a wide range of targets. Either kind of conduct, if carried to the reprehensible extremes evident in these two cases, amounts, in my view, to illegal entrapment.