Opinion ID: 431715
Heading Depth: 2
Heading Rank: 3

Heading: The Issue of Entrapment.

Text: 36 Murphy argues that the court's charge on the issue of entrapment was erroneous in that it did not refer to Murphy's lack of knowledge that the guns were unregistered or refer to the fact that there was no application for registration on file, or refer to the fact that there were registration requirements. To rebut an entrapment defense, the argument runs, the government must establish that the defendant was predisposed to commit the particular offense charged, as opposed to being generally predisposed to violate the law. See United States v. Hawke, 505 F.2d 817, 822 (10th Cir.1974), cert. denied, 420 U.S. 978, 95 S.Ct. 1404, 43 L.Ed.2d 658 (1975). Murphy claims that since it is the lack of registration or the lack of an application on file which makes receipt or possession of the gun a crime, see United States v. Bass, 404 U.S. 336, 339 n. 4, 92 S.Ct. 515, 518 n. 4, 30 L.Ed.2d 488 (1971), an interest in obtaining guns does not necessarily indicate or establish a predisposition unlawfully to possess unregistered guns. Murphy adds that undercover agent DeVecchio testified that he never told Murphy that the firearms had or had not been registered. 37 But it is clear that the crime is committed whether or not the possessor of an unregistered weapon knows about the registration requirements. United States v. Freed, 401 U.S. 601, 607-10, 91 S.Ct. 1112, 1117-18, 28 L.Ed.2d 356 (1971); United States v. Mayo, 705 F.2d at 78. Ignorance of the registration requirements simply does not play any role in a defense predicated on negating the mental state required for commission of the crime. United States v. Freed, 401 U.S. at 607-10, 91 S.Ct. at 1117-18. Moreover, evidence from the tape recordings indicated that Murphy did know that we're talking about weapons that must have been got somewhere illegally; he was, after all, dealing with what he thought was the Mafia. Also, the guns involved were M-16 machine guns. As the Supreme Court noted in Freed, as to hand grenades, one would hardly be surprised to learn that possession ... is not an innocent act. 401 U.S. at 609, 91 S.Ct. at 1118. See also id. at 616, 91 S.Ct. at 1121 (Brennan, J., concurring) (act covers major weapons such as machineguns ... [and] [w]ithout exception, the likelihood of governmental regulation of the distribution of such weapons is so great that anyone must be presumed to be aware of it). See also United States v. Bennett, 709 F.2d 803, 806 (2d Cir.1983). 38 Toner, in turn, argues that he was entitled to an entrapment charge, which the court did not give. His argument is that the alleged inducement communicated to Murphy by the government agents was communicated to him by Murphy and that, even if such evidence is lacking, he nevertheless deserved the entrapment charge under United States v. Valencia, 645 F.2d 1158, 1168 n. 10 (2d Cir.1980), (Valencia I ). But as Valencia I and the subsequent opinion on appeal after remand, 677 F.2d 191 (2d Cir.1982) (Valencia II ), indicates, there is a burden of showing that the government's inducement was directly communicated to the person seeking an entrapment charge, and Toner's evidence does not meet this requirement. The most that can be said from the evidence on the record is that the FBI was interested in knowing whether Murphy was involved with others, which is quite different from saying that the FBI consciously recruited someone to help Murphy commit the crimes. It was Murphy himself who first raised the fact that he would be accompanied by someone else and who persisted in the plan even when DeVecchio suggested to him that he would rather do the deal alone. The fact that Murphy and Toner socialized at a bar is simply not sufficient evidence of direct communication of the inducement to permit the question even to go to the jury. Valencia II, 677 F.2d at 192. 39 Nor is the question that was left open in footnote 10 of Valencia I --whether a defendant may raise an indirect entrapment defense when an intermediary brings him into a scheme that was generated by a government agent, but where the defendant is not made aware of any importuning by that agent or has not been introduced to that agent, 645 F.2d at 1168 n. 10,--any longer open in this court. In Valencia II we first dismissed appellant's argument that the fact of the marital relationship was sufficient to raise an inference of direct communication to a spouse of the government agent's inducement of the other spouse. We then held that appellant, whose circumstances very closely resembled those set forth in footnote 10 to Valencia I, was not entitled to an entrapment charge, and so holding, closed the previously open question. Moreover, in United States v. Myers, 692 F.2d 823, 840 n. 13 (2d Cir.1982), cert. denied, sub nom. Lederer v. United States, --- U.S. ----, 103 S.Ct. 2437, 77 L.Ed.2d 1322 (1983), it was said that [g]overnment responsibility has been rejected where the circumstances showed [that] ... an agent induces a middleman to commit a crime, and the middleman, responding to the pressure upon him, takes it upon himself to induce another person to participate in the crime. See also Note, Entrapment Through Unsuspecting Middlemen, 95 Harv.L.Rev. 1122, 1127-29 (1982). 40