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

Heading: the origins of the entrapment defense

Text: The entrapment defense developed in the United States in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. [1] The prevailing view in the nineteenth century was that government inducement provided no defense to a criminal charge. [2] A number of state courts condemned the practice of entrapment (i.e., government-manufactured crime), but few actually held that the entrapment entitled the defendant to an acquittal. Marcus, The development of entrapment law, 33 Wayne L. R. 5, 11 (1986). The criticism of government inducement generally occurred in obiter dictum. See Woo Wai v. United States, 223 F. 412, 415-416 (C.A.9, 1915) (citing six state cases from 1878-1910); Barlow, Entrapment and the common law: Is there a place for the American doctrine of entrapment?, 41 Mod. L. R. 266, 269 (1978). In 1879, the Texas Court of Appeals held, for the first time ever, that an entrapped defendant could not be convicted of the charged crime. See O'Brien v. State, 6 Tex.App. 665 (1879). In O'Brien, the defendant had been convicted of bribery for attempting to pay a sheriff's deputy for a prisoner's release from the jailhouse. The parties disputed whether the defendant or the deputy first suggested the idea for the bribe. The trial court instructed the jury that this fact was irrelevant, as long as the defendant eventually agreed to pay a bribe. The Texas Court of Appeals reversed, explaining that it would be not within the spirit of the bribery statute to convict the defendant of bribery if the deputy originated the criminal intent and joined the defendant in the commission of the crime merely to entrap the defendant. Id. at 668. The court also observed that it was unable to find any adjudicated case in support of its holding. Id. Thirty-six years later, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals became the first federal court to bar a criminal conviction on grounds of entrapment in Woo Wai, supra . [3] Relying on O'Brien, and on dicta from five other state cases, the court explained that a sound public policy can be upheld only by denying the criminality of those who are thus induced to commit acts which infringe the letter of the criminal statutes. Woo Wai, supra at 415. Most remaining federal circuits soon after recognized some form of the entrapment defense. See Sorrells v. United States, 287 U.S. 435, 443, 53 S.Ct. 210, 77 L.Ed. 413 (1932) (citing cases). One representative case of the era, Butts v. United States, 273 F. 35, 38 (C.A.8, 1921), provided the following rationale for the doctrine: The first duties of the officers of the law are to prevent, not to punish crime. It is not their duty to incite to and create crime for the sole purpose of prosecuting and punishing it. Here the evidence strongly tends to prove, if it does not conclusively do so, that their first and chief endeavor was to cause, to create, crime in order to punish it, and it is unconscionable, contrary to public policy, and to the established law of the land to punish a man for the commission of an offense of the like of which he had never been guilty, either in thought or in deed, and evidently never would have been guilty of if the officers of the law had not inspired, incited, persuaded, and lured him to attempt to commit it. The early entrapment cases demonstrate that entrapment was not a traditional common-law justification or excuse defense based on the defendant's culpability. Rather, it arose from the burgeoning idea that punishing defendants for criminal violations manufactured by the government was offensive to public policy (or, in the case of O'Brien, supra, offensive to the spirit of the criminal law).