Court Opinion

ID: 9460173
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-04 21:43:58.642254+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:36:30.984572
License: Public Domain

GEE, Circuit Judge
(specially concurring) :
I agree that the judgment must be reversed because a Blue charge was given, one which invited the jury to treat the matter of proof as a fair fight between the United States and Oquendo rather than as one weighted in his favor by the reasonable doubt rule. This is so even if Oquendo’s only real defense, the Bueno doctrine, was disapproved by the Supreme Court in United States v. Russell, 411 U.S. 423, 93 S.Ct. 1637, 36 L. Ed.2d 366 (1973). His not guilty plea placed all in issue, and the Blue charge given may well have infected the entire spectrum of the jury’s deliberations.
Regretfully, I cannot agree that Bueno remains good law. As the majority makes plain,1 Bueno focuses exclusively on an aspect of governmental activity — furnishing the defendant narcotics to sell — and applies even where the Sherman-Sorrells type of entrapment— *167which turns exclusively on defendant’s predisposition to the crime — does not exist.
In Russell, after pointing out that the Court of Appeals had expanded the traditional notion of entrapment which “focuses on the predisposition of the defendant” to require dismissal by focusing upon governmental activity and the degree of it, after citing Bueno as well as some other circuit and district court cases, and after pointing out (on the same page) that in Sorrells the thrust of the entrapment defense as recognized by the Court was toward the predisposition of the defendant while the minority focused on activity of the government, the Court observes:
We are content to leave the matter where it was left by the Court in Sherman. . . . Several decisions of the United States district courts and courts of appeals have undoubtedly gone beyond this Court’s opinion in Sorrells and Sherman in order to bar prosecutions because of what they thought to be for want of a better term “overzealous law enforcement.” But the defense of entrapment enunciated in those opinions [context indicates Supreme Court’s opinions in Sherman and Sorrells] was not intended to give the federal judiciary a “chancellor’s foot” veto over law enforcement practices of which it did not approve. ... It is only when the government’s deception actually implants the criminal design in the mind of the defendant that the defense of entrapment comes into play, (emphasis added)
411 U.S., at 434, 93 S.Ct. at 1644, 36 L.Ed.2d, at 375.
It seems plain to me that in its Russell opinion the Court is saying that there have been two views about entrapment since its inception, a majority view which focused solely on the predisposition of the defendant and a minority view which focused either solely or in addition on the activity of the governmental agents, and that the Court deliberately rejects the second view2 and hews to the first. For whatever it may be worth, I am not here disagreeing with Bueno and its siblings at all. I simply think the Supreme Court does and has said so.

. See, e. g., footnote 8, supra.

. Except for an anchor to windward concerning conduct of government agents with which the Court “may some day be presented . so outrageous that due process would absolutely bar the government from invoking judicial processes to obtain a conviction.” 411 U.S., at 431, 93 S.Ct. at 1642, 36 L.Ed.2d, at 373. Cited as an analogous situation is Rochin v. California, 342 U.S. 165, 72 S.Ct. 205, 96 L.Ed. 183 (1952), in which incriminating evidence was recovered from a handcuffed defendant by means of an emetic solution forced through a tube inserted against his will into his stomach. The Bueno situation and those in other cases cited and ready-toliand were not instanced.