Opinion ID: 1857516
Heading Depth: 2
Heading Rank: 2

Heading: prior illegal acts

Text: Sanders next complains that the court erred when it allowed the State to introduce his prior illegal acts. At the trial below, defense attorney Johnny Price told Judge Pigott and prosecuting attorney Dunn Lampton that he proposed to use the doctrine of entrapment as a defense, requested and received a jury instruction on entrapment, and discussed entrapment during his opening argument. Where entrapment is pled as a defense, evidence of predisposition is always relevant and, hence, always admissible. This is because the very idea of entrapment suggests that the person would have never committed a crime had he not been persuaded or otherwise enticed. Moore v. State, 534 So.2d 557, 558-559 (Miss. 1988) (citations omitted). Additionally, under Sayre v. State, 533 So.2d 464 (Miss. 1988), [w]hether (the defendant) has committed other similar acts in the past is relevant within our evidence law; that is, such evidence has a tendency to show predisposition. Id. at 466. The facts of Sayre are somewhat similar to the facts of the case below. There, as in this case, the defendant never waived his right to claim entrapment or lack of predisposition. Furthermore, in both Sayre and the case at bar, the case went to the jury with an entrapment instruction and the defense ultimately failed to prove their entrapment claim. This Court wrote in Sayre in discussing whether testimony about previous drug sales brought out on cross-examination of the defendant was admissible: That Sayre ultimately failed in his entrapment defense hardly affects admissibility. At the time the prosecuting attorney was faced with deciding whether to cross-examine Sayre, the predisposition issue was alive and well. Sayre had not rested his case, and the Circuit Court would have erred had it thereafter denied him the right to offer evidence or lack of predisposition. The Circuit Court correctly held Sayre's prior marijuana-related criminal activity relevant and thus admissible. The argument we are presented today is that, because Sayre never denied predisposition, the prosecution was precluded from proving it. This logic would empower an accused to pretermit much of the prosecution's proof by an admission or a failure to deny. We have rejected this tactic in cases with much higher stakes. Id. at 466-467. In the case at bar, the defense raised the issue of entrapment yet never introduced evidence of entrapment. Nevertheless, the issue was alive throughout the trial, from being discussed on the defense's opening argument to being submitted as a jury instruction. If a defendant says to the jury, judge and prosecution that he will raise proof of a certain defense, the judge and prosecution should be allowed to believe that the defendant will indeed raise proof of that defense. The prosecution should also be allowed to introduce evidence based on this belief which will rebut that defense. When Judge Pigott let the disputed evidence of Sanders' previous drug transactions with Morris be introduced, entrapment was still very much a viable defense. Indeed, as entrapment was allowed as a jury instruction, one could say that it was an issue throughout the entire trial. Because the disputed evidence went to prove Sanders' predisposition to commit the crime of which he was accused, and as such predisposition evidence is admissible where entrapment is raised as a defense, the ruling of Judge Pigott which allowed the introduction of such evidence was proper.