Opinion ID: 757749
Heading Depth: 2
Heading Rank: 1

Heading: The Outrageous Government Conduct Doctrine

Text: 29 It is the law of this circuit that a criminal defendant may raise a due process challenge to an indictment against her based on a claim that the government employed outrageous law enforcement investigative techniques. See Voigt, 89 F.3d at 1064. The notion that misconduct by the government in investigating crime could give rise to a due process violation traces its modern roots to Rochin v. California, 342 U.S. 165, 72 S.Ct. 205, 96 L.Ed. 183 (1952), in which the Court vacated the conviction of a suspected drug pusher whose stomach had been forcibly pumped so that the police could attempt to obtain incriminating evidence likely found therein. Twenty years later, in the now-famous dictum which spawned the so-called outrageous conduct defense, the Court affirmed that Rochin, while rare, was not a unique case: 30 [W]e may some day be presented with a situation in which the conduct of law enforcement agents is so outrageous that due process principles would absolutely bar the government from invoking judicial processes to obtain a conviction. 31 United States v. Russell, 411 U.S. 423, 431-32, 93 S.Ct. 1637, 36 L.Ed.2d 366 (1973) (citing Rochin ). 32 The Court revisited this dictum in Hampton v. United States, 425 U.S. 484, 96 S.Ct. 1646, 48 L.Ed.2d 113 (1976), in which the defendant, relying on Russell, argued for the application of a due process based outrageous misconduct defense. Although the Court rejected his claim, the legal viability of the defense was maintained by a narrow margin. 4 Yet, shortly thereafter, signs appeared that that narrow margin was beginning to shift. In United States v. Payner, 447 U.S. 727, 100 S.Ct. 2439, 65 L.Ed.2d 468 (1980), the government employed a confederate to distract a bank official while agents rifled through his briefcase and found documents that were eventually used in the prosecution of some of the bank's customers. The customers could not challenge the search under the Fourth Amendment because they did not have a cognizable privacy interest in the briefcase, and the Court held that its supervisory power similarly did not authorize a federal court to suppress the evidence. See 447 U.S. at 735, 100 S.Ct. 2439. Justice Powell, author of the Hampton concurrence, wrote for the Court: 33 But even if we assume that the unlawful briefcase search was so outrageous as to offend fundamental canons of decency and fairness, ... the fact remains that [t]he limitations of the Due Process Clause ... come into play only when the Government activity in question violates some protected right of the defendant. 34 Id. at 737 n. 9, 100 S.Ct. 2439 (citing Hampton, 425 U.S. at 490, 96 S.Ct. 1646 (plurality opinion) (internal citations omitted)). 35 While one could read the Payner dictum narrowly to say merely that a defendant may raise the outrageousness defense only when it is his or her rights that have been violated (and not, for example, the privacy rights of others), some have read Justice Powell's adoption of the Hampton plurality's language in Payner as a sign that a majority of the Court no longer believed in the viability of the defense. See United States v. Miller, 891 F.2d 1265, 1272 (7th Cir.1989) (Easterbrook, J., concurring). 5 While Judge Easterbrook's viewpoint may ultimately prevail, and while it appears that the viability of the doctrine is hanging by a thread, see, e.g., Tucker, 28 F.3d at 1426-27, and Boyd, 55 F.3d at 241, we have, since Payner, concluded that we have no reason to doubt that the Court continues to recognize a due process claim premised upon outrageous law enforcement investigative techniques. Voigt, 89 F.3d at 1064. Many of the other circuits have done the same. See United States v. Mosley, 965 F.2d 906, 909 (10th Cir.1992) (collecting cases recognizing the viability of the defense from the D.C., First, Fifth, Eighth, Ninth, Tenth, and Eleventh Circuits). 36 While continuing to recognize, in theory, the outrageousness defense, we have nonetheless observed that, because of the extraordinary nature of the doctrine, the judiciary has been extremely hesitant to uphold claims that law enforcement conduct violates the Due Process clause. See Voigt, 89 F.3d at 1065; United States v. Jannotti, 673 F.2d 578, 608 (3d Cir.1982) (in banc ). The First Circuit similarly has declared the outrageous government misconduct doctrine moribund in light of the fact that, in practice, courts have rejected its application with almost monotonous regularity. United States v. Santana, 6 F.3d 1, 4 (1st Cir.1993) (The banner of outrageous misconduct is often raised but seldom saluted.). Indeed, since Hampton, the only opinion upholding the application of the defense is the opinion for a divided panel of this court in United States v. Twigg, 588 F.2d 373 (3d Cir.1978). 6 Twigg, however, involved a quite egregious case of government overinvolvement in which the government's undercover operative essentially concocted and conducted the entire illicit scheme. Although Twigg rightly suggested that no justifying social objective is served when law enforcement creates new crimes for the sake of bringing charges against a suspect that the government itself has persuaded into participating in wrongdoing, see id. at 379 (citing United States v. West, 511 F.2d 1083, 1085 (3d Cir.1975)), it distinguished its facts from the situation where an undercover agent becomes involved in the operation after the criminal scheme has been created. See Twigg, 588 F.2d at 380. Thus, Twigg itself is of little help to Nolan-Cooper. 7 37 While we reaffirmed the cognizability of a due process claim premised on outrageous government conduct in Voigt, supra, that case does not shed much light on how we should analyze such claims because it deals specifically with deliberate intrusions by the government into the attorney-client relationship. See Voigt, 89 F.3d at 1067. Voigt observes that the showing required to make out an outrageous conduct claim, is by no means pellucid. Voigt, 89 F.3d at 1064. And, other courts have experienced considerable difficulty in translating outrageous misconduct into a defined set of behavioral norms. See Santana, 6 F.3d at 3-4. One parsing of the Russell dictum which spawned the defense suggests that some variant of the fundamental fairness standard should be applied as the sounding line for outrageousness. Id. at 4. And a survey of the case law reports that: 38 Although the requirement of outrageousness has been stated in several different ways by various courts, the thrust of each of these formulations is that the challenged conduct must be shocking, outrageous, and clearly intolerable.... The cases make it clear that this is an extraordinary defense reserved for only the most egregious circumstances. It is not to be invoked each time the government acts deceptively or participates in a crime that it is investigating. Nor is it intended merely as a device to circumvent the predisposition test in the entrapment defense. 39 Mosley, 965 F.2d at 910. Though lacking in mathematical precision, the shocking, outrageous, and clearly intolerable standard provides sufficient guidance to courts attempting to assess whether particular government conduct is fundamentally unfair and thereby offends due process. See Santana, 6 F.3d at 4. It also underscores how rare application of the Due Process clause is in these circumstances. 40