Opinion ID: 1986216
Heading Depth: 1
Heading Rank: 2

Heading: seeking a legal foundation-the development of the entrapment defense in the united states supreme court

Text: Two rival theories dominate the law of entrapment today. The federal courts and a majority of states have adopted the subjective view of entrapment. The subjective view focuses primarily on the defendant's disposition before the offense. The Model Penal Code, most legal commentators, and a minority of states favor the objective view of entrapment. The objective view focuses primarily on the nature of the police conduct before the crime. [4] Each theory has its genesis in Sorrells, supra, the first United States Supreme Court decision to adopt the entrapment defense. The majority opinion in Sorrells, authored by Chief Justice Hughes, set forth the theoretical basis for the subjective view. A separate opinion of Justice Roberts did the same for the rival objective view. The merits of their respective positions were again considered in Sherman v. United States, 356 U.S. 369, 78 S.Ct. 819, 2 L.Ed.2d 848 (1958), and United States v. Russell, 411 U.S. 423, 93 S.Ct. 1637, 36 L.Ed.2d 366 (1973).
The defendant in Sorrells sold contraband liquor to an undercover prohibition agent posing as a tourist. The agent visited the defendant at the defendant's home while accompanied by three residents of the county who knew the defendant well. Id. at 439, 53 S.Ct. 210. The agent and the defendant were both veterans of the First World War and former members of the same military division. Although the defendant rebuffed the agent's initial requests for liquor, he eventually agreed to procure some after the conversation turned to reminiscences of the war. The trial court refused to allow the jury to consider the defense of entrapment. The defendant was convicted for possessing and selling whisky in violation of the National Prohibition Act. Conceding that the weight of authority in the lower federal courts suggested that the defense of entrapment should have been available to the defendant under the circumstances, the Solicitor General argued that entrapment was an invalid defense because its application required the judicial branch to disregard violations of the criminal statutes enacted by the legislative branch. Id. at 443-446, 53 S.Ct. 210. The Sorrells Court answered this contention by explaining that, although the defendant's conduct brought him within the letter of the criminal statute, sustaining his conviction would do violence to the spirit and purpose of the provision. Id. at 446-448, 53 S.Ct. 210. Relying on the absurd results method of statutory construction, [5] the Court opined that Congress, in enacting the statute at issue, could not have intended for its literal provisions to apply to otherwise innocent persons lured into committing statutorily proscribed acts by government officials. Id. at 451, 53 S.Ct. 210. The Court also explained that [t]he predisposition and criminal design of the defendant are relevant considerations in entrapment cases, because the controlling question is whether the defendant is a person otherwise innocent whom the government is seeking to punish for an alleged offense which is the product of the creative activity of its own officials. Id. On the basis of this test, the majority concluded that the trial court erred in refusing to submit the issue of entrapment to the jury. Justice Roberts, joined by Justices Brandeis and Stone, agreed that the defendant's conviction should have been reversed, but disagreed with the majority's implied congressional intent rationale. Justice Roberts found the true foundation of the [entrapment] doctrine in the public policy which protects the purity of government and its processes. Id. at 455, 53 S.Ct. 210. The doctrine of entrapment, he reasoned, was simply a criminal law analogy to the civil doctrines by which courts refuse their aid to the perpetration and consummation of an illegal scheme. Id. at 455, 53 S.Ct. 210. Justice Roberts further accused the majority of simply inventing a new method of rationalizing the defense and engaging in judicial legislation. Id. at 455, 458, 53 S.Ct. 210. In his view, the majority rule required a strained and unwarranted construction of the statute. Acknowledging that an entrapped defendant falls within the letter of the law and is thus rendered amenable to its penalties, Justice Roberts concluded that courts nevertheless retain the inherent right to protect themselves from the prostitution of the criminal law. Id. at 456-457, 53 S.Ct. 210. Given this view, he suggested that the power of finding entrapment should be held by the court rather than the jury. Justice Roberts also criticized the majority's focus on the defendant's disposition: To say that [instigation and inducement of a crime] by an official of government is condoned and rendered innocuous by the fact that the defendant had a bad reputation or had previously transgressed is wholly to disregard the reason for refusing the processes of the court to consummate an abhorrent transaction. It is to discard the basis of the doctrine and in effect to weigh the equities as between the government and the defendant when there are in truth no equities belonging to the latter, and when the rule of action cannot rest on any estimate of the good which may come of the conviction of the offender by foul means. The accepted procedure, in effect, pivots conviction in such cases, not on the commission of the crime charged, but on the prior reputation or some former act or acts of the defendant not mentioned in the indictment. [ Id. at 459, 53 S.Ct. 210.] Concluding that the defendant had been entrapped as a matter of law, Justice Roberts opined that the case should be remanded to the district court with instructions to quash the indictment and discharge the defendant. Responding to Justice Roberts, the majority explained that the proper function of a court is to construe a statute, not to defeat a statute as construed. Id. at 449, 53 S.Ct. 210. Allowing a court to refuse to try a case where the defendant's conduct falls within the applicable statute, because the court desires to let the defendant go free, would interfere with the executive authority to seek to proceed with the prosecution and the legislative authority to define illegal conduct. Id. at 449-450, 53 S.Ct. 210. Judicial nullification of statutes, admittedly valid and applicable, has, happily, no place in our system. Id. at 450, 53 S.Ct. 210. Finally, the majority rejected Justice Roberts' analogy to civil and equitable doctrines: Suggested analogies from procedure in civil cases are not helpful. When courts of law refuse to sustain alleged causes of action which grow out of illegal schemes, the applicable law itself denies the right to recover. Where courts of equity refuse equitable relief because complainants come with unclean hands, they are administering the principles of equitable jurisprudence governing equitable rights. But in a criminal prosecution, the statute defining the offense is necessarily the law of the case. [ Id. at 450, 53 S.Ct. 210.]
Twenty-six years later, in Sherman, supra, the Court reaffirmed the approach taken by the Sorrells majority. The majority in Sherman did not undertake a critical analysis of the Sorrells rationale, but rather rested its decision on prudential and stare decisis grounds. [6] Reiterating the importance of the predisposition inquiry, the Court explained that [t]o determine whether entrapment has been established, a line must be drawn between the trap for the unwary innocent and the trap for the unwary criminal. Id. at 372, 93 S.Ct. 1637. As in Sorrells, a significant group of justices offered a different view of the entrapment defense. Justice Frankfurter, joined by Justices Douglas, Harlan and Brennan, filed a separate opinion built on the foundation laid by Justice Roberts in Sorrells. The separate opinion criticized as sheer fiction the implied legislative intent theory underlying the majority rule. Sherman, supra, at 379, 78 S.Ct. 819. It next repeated Justice Roberts' policy attack on the majority view, suggesting that a defendant's past crimes should not forever outlaw the criminal and open him to police practices, aimed at securing his repeated conviction, from which the ordinary citizen is protected. Id. at 383, 78 S.Ct. 819. More importantly, Justice Frankfurter suggested a specific source of the Court's authority to regulate objectionable police conduct. In his view, the only legitimate basis for enforcing the entrapment defense was the Supreme Court's supervisory jurisdiction over the administration of criminal justice. Id. at 380-381, 78 S.Ct. 819. He opined that when courts refuse to convict an entrapped defendant, they do so as an exercise of a recognized jurisdiction to formulate and apply `proper standards for the enforcement of the federal criminal law in the federal courts.' Id. at 380, 78 S.Ct. 819, quoting McNabb v. United States, 318 U.S. 332, 341, 63 S.Ct. 608, 87 L.Ed. 819 (1943). [7] The formulation of such standards, he reasoned, does not in any way conflict with the statute the defendant has violated, or involve the initiation of a judicial policy disregarding or qualifying that framed by Congress, because Congress enacts criminal statutes with the presupposition that the courts will formulate the requisite standards for the administration of criminal justice. Sherman, supra at 381, 78 S.Ct. 819. Thus, a false choice is put when it is said that either the defendant's conduct does not fall within the statute or he must be convicted. Id. Finally, Justice Frankfurter proposed a specific, objective standard for identifying when entrapment occurs. Under his test, the police should act in such a manner as is likely to induce to the commission of crime only those persons ready and willing to commit further crimes should the occasion arise and not others who would normally avoid crime and through selfstruggle resist ordinary temptations. Id. at 383-384, 78 S.Ct. 819. This standard, he reasoned, draws directly on the fundamental intuition that led in the first instance to the outlawing of `entrapment' as a prosecutorial instrument. Essentially, the power of government is abused when employed to promote rather than detect crime. Id. at 384, 78 S.Ct. 819.
The next major decision from the United States Supreme Court came in 1973. In Russell, supra, an undercover officer investigating the defendant for illegally manufacturing the drug methamphetamine supplied the defendant with an essential ingredient for producing the drug. The necessary ingredient, although difficult to obtain, was itself harmless and legal. Using the ingredient supplied by the officer, the defendant manufactured and sold methamphetamine. A jury rejected the defendant's entrapment defense, but the Ninth Circuit reversed on due process grounds after finding an intolerable degree of governmental participation in the criminal enterprise. Id. at 427, 93 S.Ct. 1637. The Supreme Court reversed, concluding that the police officer's act of providing the harmless ingredient to gain the defendant's confidence was not a due process violation but rather a permissible means of investigation. Id. at 432, 93 S.Ct. 1637. Responding to the defendant's contention that the Court should apply an exclusionary rule to bar police involvement in criminal activity, the Court explained that the government's conduct violated no independent constitutional right of the defendant. [8] Id. at 430, 93 S.Ct. 1637. Although the Court rejected the defendant's due process argument, it did not foreclose the possibility that such a defense might exist on different facts: While we 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, cf. Rochin v. California, 342 U.S. 165, 72 S.Ct. 205, 96 L.Ed. 183 (1952), the instant case is distinctly not of that breed. [ Russell, supra at 431-432, 93 S.Ct. 1637.] [9] The Court also rejected the defendant's contention that the nonconstitutional defense of entrapment should be broadened to mandate dismissal in all cases involving overzealous law enforcement. Id. at 428, 432-433, 93 S.Ct. 1637. After reaffirming the longstanding rule of Sorrells and Sherman, the Court explained that the entrapment defense was not intended to give the federal judiciary a `chancellor's foot' veto over law enforcement practices of which it did not approve. [10] Russell, supra at 435, 93 S.Ct. 1637. A contrary rule would improperly interfere with the authority of the executive branch to execute the federal laws. Justice Douglas, joined by Justice Brennan, dissented. He opined that the defendant had been entrapped because the police officer was an active participant in the unlawful activity. Id. at 437, 93 S.Ct. 1637. Without respect to the objective question whether the police conduct likely would have caused an otherwise innocent person to commit a crime, Justice Douglas reasoned that courts should not tolerate the conduct of officers who become the instigators of the crime, or partners in its commission, or the creative brain behind the illegal scheme. Id. at 439, 93 S.Ct. 1637. Justice Stewart, joined by Justices Brennan and Marshall, dissented separately. He advocated the objective view of entrapment espoused by Justices Roberts and Frankfurter in Sorrells and Sherman. Regarding congressional intent purportedly underlying the majority rule of Sorrells, Justice Stewart opined: I find it impossible to believe that the purpose of the defense is to effectuate some unexpressed congressional intent to exclude from its criminal statutes persons who committed a prohibited act, but would not have done so except for the Government's inducements. Russell, supra, at 441-442, 93 S.Ct. 1637. Justice Stewart questioned how an entrapped defendant, who has by definition committed the charged offense, could be accurately described as otherwise innocent. He also wondered why a defendant induced, provoked, or tempted to commit an offense by the government would be any more innocent or any less predisposed than he would be if he had been induced, provoked, or tempted by a private personwhich, of course, would not entitle him to cry `entrapment.' Id. at 442, 93 S.Ct. 1637. Given this logical conundrum, Justice Stewart reasoned that the purpose of the entrapment defense must not be to protect otherwise innocent persons, but rather to prohibit unlawful governmental activity in instigating crime. Id. He then suggested that the subjective view's focus on innocence or predisposition unjustly caused the defendant's past criminal record to determine whether police conduct directed toward the defendant is permissible. Id. at 443-444, 93 S.Ct. 1637. On the basis of these practical concerns, Justice Stewart endorsed an objective test for entrapment similar to that proposed by Justice Frankfurter in Sherman: [G]overnment agents may engage in conduct that is likely, when objectively considered, to afford a person ready and willing to commit the crime an opportunity to do so. But when the agents' involvement in criminal activities goes beyond the mere offering of such an opportunity and when their conduct is of a kind that could induce or instigate the commission of a crime by one not ready and willing to commit it, thenregardless of the character or propensities of the particular person inducedI think entrapment has occurred. For in that situation, the Government has engaged in the impermissible manufacturing of crime, and the federal courts should bar the prosecution in order to preserve the institutional integrity of the system of federal criminal justice. [ Russell, supra at 445, 93 S.Ct. 1637 (citations omitted).]