Court Opinion

ID: 9482774
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-05 08:59:53.768182+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:39:57.722180
License: Public Domain

CLARK, Senior Circuit Judge,
dissenting:
This case is concerned with the “manufacturing of crime by law enforcement officials and their agents.”1 The first crime was planned and engineered to occur January 7,1987. When the proof of identity from Agents Bledsoe and Harvey was too weak to indict Miller, a second identical crime was manufactured to occur September 3, 1987. The majority states “[w]e conclude that the similarity of the two offenses in this case is sufficient to mark the offenses as the handiwork of the accused.” I agree that the two crimes occurred at the same house with the same buyer, Lyons, and that Agent Bledsoe drove the government vehicle and furnished the purchase money. Additionally, on both occasions Miller drove Lyons around the block while exchanging cocaine for the money, and Miller returned Lyons to Lyons’ mother’s house. The January crime ended with Miller driving away from the house without being apprehended by drug agents who followed him by automobile and airplane. In the September reenactment of the January transaction, however, the agents swarmed around Miller as soon as Lyons left the vehicle.
I conclude that the majority’s reasoning is faulty. The majority states at slip op. page 1539: “When extrinsic offense evidence is introduced to prove identity, ‘the likeness of the offense is the crucial consideration. The physical similarity must be such that it marks the offenses as the handiwork of the accused. In other words, the evidence must demonstrate a modus operandi.’ ”2 It is an inescapable conclusion that the modus operandi was that of the government and the similarities were marks of the handiwork of the government, not of Miller.
The majority’s true holding is that when a government-induced sting operation goes sour by not producing enough evidence to indict, the officials are free to repeat the same scenario in an errorless manner, to use the second crime evidence to bolster its insufficient proof in the first incident, and, of course, convict the defendant for the second crime as well.
I believe that limits should be placed on the power of the government in the manufacture of crimes. One of those limits would be to disallow “other crimes” evidence in cases like this one. In this case, the government not only manufactured the crimes, but it did so in order to manufacture evidence to procure a conviction for a prior crime. I would limit the government’s case to its second incident and thus only one conviction. The members of this court are aware that a large number of drug convictions arise in situations similar to this one. The government has a suspicion of a party’s guilt, so the government sets up an entrapment with the assistance of informers either paid or indebted to the government by way of a promised light sentence.3
In several cases, distinguished jurists have raised questions about placing some limitations on government manufactured *1542crimes.4 In Sherman v. United States,5 Justice Frankfurter wrote:
No matter what the defendant’s past record and present inclinations to criminality, or the depths to which he has sunk in the estimation of society, certain police conduct to ensnare him into further crime is not to be tolerated by an advanced society.6
Despite warnings of this kind, we have approved such procedures. In a recent case,7 informers went to Colombia where they contracted to purchase cocaine from a seller. An FBI agent then flew the drugs to Miami. The Colombia seller came to the United States to insure collection of the funds, and both the seller and the Miami purchaser were convicted.
We should desist from encouraging the government to use entrapment as its primary method of obtaining sufficient evidence to obtain a conviction. Encouraging entrapment serves to discourage the government from obtaining primary evidence of guilt through traditional investigative measures, thereby increasing the possibility of convicting an innocent “targeted suspect.”8 I do not suggest that Miller was innocent. I do suggest that the evidence of the September crime as part of the trial of the January incident was prejudicial to Miller and improperly admitted as 404(b) evidence. I would limit the government to one conviction of Miller — the September indictment.

. This phrase was first used by Justice Harlan in Lopez v. United States, 373 U.S. 427, 434, 83 S.Ct. 1381, 1385, 10 L.Ed.2d 462 (1963).

. Majority at 1539 (citing Beechum, 582 F.2d at 912, n. 15).

.In 1989, the United States government paid $63 million to confidential informants. Moreover, ninety percent of all search warrant affidavits filed in the U.S. District Court in Atlanta in 1989 were based at least in part on confidential informants’ representations. Mark Curri-*1542den, Making Crime Pay, ABA J., June 1991, at 43.

. See, e.g., United States v. Russell, 411 U.S. 423, 93 S.Ct. 1637, 1646-52, 36 L.Ed.2d 366 (1973) (Stewart, J., dissenting) (joined by Brennan and Marshall, JJ.); Sorrells v. United States, 287 U.S. 435, 53 S.Ct. 210, 217-19, 77 L.Ed. 413 (1932) (Roberts, J., concurring) (joined by Brandéis and Stone, JJ.).

. 356 U.S. 369, 78 S.Ct. 819, 2 L.Ed.2d 848 (1958).

. Id. 78 S.Ct. at 826 (Frankfurter, J., concurring) (joined by Douglas, Harlan, and Brennan, JJ.).

. United States v. Londono, 958 F.2d 1082 (11th Cir.1992) (unpublished).

. "Federal agents admit there are many professional informers like David S. who have six-digit incomes. They justify paying big bucks to informants for several reasons: It saves police the time and expense of infiltrating a criminal enterprise, and it gives them an operative who can engage in illegal activities that might constitute entrapment if a law enforcement officer performed them.” Curriden, supra note 3, at 44.