Court Opinion

ID: 9550985
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-07 18:46:16.089522+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T15:22:51.686828
License: Public Domain

*694CLARK, J., Dissenting.
The most significant question presented by this case is whether this court should adopt the “hypothetical-person” (“objective”) test of entrapment.
The test now applied in California, in all but seven of the other states, and in the federal courts is the “origin-of-intent” (“subjective”) standard. This test focuses, quite properly, upon the guilt of the particular defendant, asking whether he was predisposed to commit the crime charged. If he was ready and willing to commit the offense at any favorable opportunity, then the entrapment defense fails even if the police used an unduly persuasive inducement.
The guilt of the particular defendant is irrelevant under the hypothetical-person test. It focuses instead upon the conduct of the police. If the police use an inducement likely to cause a hypothetical person to commit the crime charged, then the fact that the particular defendant was ready and willing to commit it does not defeat the entrapment defense. The evil of the hypothetical-person test is apparent —it leads to acquittal of persons who are in fact guilty. By focusing on police conduct rather than the defendant’s predisposition, it creates a risk of acquitting dangerous chronic offenders.
That risk is strikingly illustrated by the facts of this case. The evidence would support the conclusion that defendant is one of the most cynical manipulators of the criminal justice system imaginable, that he abused the trust placed in him as an employee of a drug detoxification program to sell heroin to the patients with whom he worked, nullifying the program’s slight chances of success and wasting countless thousands of tax dollars, that he initially refused to sell heroin to the deputy solely because he suspected she was an undercover officer, and that, before finally agreeing to make the sale through his wife, he sought to immunize himself by “entrapping” the deputy into the conduct he now relies upon as the basis of his entrapment defense. If the factfinder takes this view of the evidence, but also concludes the officer’s conduct would have induced a hypothetical person to commit the offense, defendant goes free.
The majority respond by quoting Justice Holmes’ observation that “it is a less .evil that some criminals should escape than that the Government should play an ignoble part.” (Ante, p. 688, fn. 2, quoting Olmstead v. United States (1928) 277 U.S. 438, 470 [72 L.Ed. 944, 953, 48 S.Ct. 564, 66 A.L.R. 376] (Holmes, J., dis.).) With deference to Justice Holmes, that is a false dichotomy. It is simply not true that society must choose between *695freeing criminals and tolerating official misconduct. Take the case in which an officer uses an unduly persuasive inducement but the defendant is ready and willing to commit the crime at any favorable opportunity. Society can and should insist upon both the criminal’s being convicted and the officer’s being disciplined. To assume that the officer will not be disciplined is but another instance of the majority’s “curious cynicism concerning the rule of law in our society” which I have elsewhere decried. (See, e.g., People v. Cook (1978) 22 Cal.3d 67, 102 [148 Cal.Rptr. 605, 583 P.2d 130] (Clark, J., dis.).)
The minority justices of the United States Supreme Court who have advocated the hypothetical-person test have argued that its adoption would increase public respect for the criminal justice system. (See, e.g., Sherman v. United States (1958) 356 U.S. 369, 380 [2 L.Ed.2d 848, 855, 78 S.Ct. 819] (Frankfurter, J., conc.).) However, the hypothetical-person approach is no way to achieve this respect. The public is, understandably, not offended by conviction of a defendant found—beyond a reasonable doubt and by unanimous vote of 12 citizens—:to have been ready and willing to commit the crime charged. But the public will be offended by the adoption of an entrapment defense that ignores culpability and seeks to control police conduct by acquittal of professional criminals. As Justice Macklin Fleming has observed: “Each time the criminal process is thwarted by a technicality that does not bear on the innocence or guilt of the accused, we trumpet abroad the notion of injustice; and each time a .patently guilty person is released, some damage is done to the general sense of justice.” (Fleming, The Price of Perfect Justice: The Adverse Consequences of Current Legal Doctrine on the American Courtroom (1974) p. 9.)
Bernard E. Witkin, beyond question the foremost commentator on California law, expressed the same sentiment when he recently addressed himself to the historic contribution of the United States Supreme Court during the period when Earl Warren was Chief Justice. His subject was “ ‘The Second Noble Experiment of the Century’ conceived in altruism, and dedicated to the principle that technical forms of criminal procedure are more important than the substance of guilt or innocence of the accused.” What Mr. Witkin has to say is always worthy of attention but his remarks on this occasion are particularly noteworthy because this court appears to see itself as keeper of the flame that might otherwise have died with the passing of the Warren era. (See, e.g., People v. Pettingill (1978) 21 Cal.3d 231, 252-254 [145 Cal.Rptr. 861, 578 P.2d 108] (Clark, J., dis.).)
*696“We begin with a simple and tragic admission: That there is a rising rate of crime and a falling rate of conviction and punishment for crime. And we are frequently told by bitter critics that the responsible agency is the judiciary; that the Courts have become increasingly concerned with barren technicalities of criminal procedure, and have lost sight of the primary objective of the criminal law. [H] Now none of us needs to be reminded that a system of criminal justice exists not just for the protection of the innocent but for the punishment of the guilty; and that only by consistent apprehension and conviction of the murderer, the burglar, the arsonist, the rapist, the drug-peddler, and other. . . predators that infest our society, can the system justify itself in the eyes of our people. We are therefore in deep trouble if, as these critics would have us believe, the judges of our state and federal courts are frustrating law enforcement by placing burdensome restrictions .on arrest, production of evidence, and trials.”
After making it clear that he considers these criticisms justified with regard to the Warren court, Witkin concludes by saying: “The cases I have discussed, and many others, demonstrate the weird and wonderful solicitude of thin majorities of our highest court of the Warren era for the professional and nonprofessional criminal. Serenely confident, with a full head of steam, the court repeatedly found new and exciting grounds upon which to reverse the convictions for major crimes on records which overwhelmingly established guilt. And the nation’s legal scholars and students writing in law school reviews, deluged us with extravagant praise for these decisions, referring to them—in what is surely the most preposterous misclassification ever, made—as decisions establishing and protecting civil liberties.” (Witkin, The Second Noble Experiment of the Twentieth Century (Sept.-Nov. 1977) Prosecutor’s Brief 42-45.)
Whatever else one may say of the Warren Court, it refused to take the step the majority of this court take today. Indeed, in Sherman v. United States, supra, 356 U.S. 369, 376-378 [2 L.Ed.2d 848, 853-854], Chief Justice Warren himself wrote the majority opinion in which the court declined to reconsider its adherence to the origin-of-intent test. With today’s decision this court outdoes its mentor in rendering guilt irrelevant.
The judgment should be affirmed.
Respondent’s petition for a rehearing was denied April 19, 1979. Clark, J., and Richardson, J., were of the opinion that the petition should be granted.