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

Heading: sorrells v. united states

Text: 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.]