Court Opinion

ID: 9472864
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-05 04:13:26.383262+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:43:12.094634
License: Public Domain

GEE, Circuit Judge, with whom, REAV-LEY, GARWOOD, E. GRADY JOLLY, PATRICK E. HIGGINBOTHAM and ROBERT MADDEN HILL, Circuit Judges,
join, dissenting.
Today’s issue is a simple one: Whether, having sworn that he had no intent to dispense drugs for non-medical purposes, Harold Henry is entitled to have his conviction reversed because, in the face of that testimony, the trial judge refused to deliver a jury instruction requested by Henry on the entrapment defense. The rationale of this defense is that Congress could not have intended to punish, as crimes, acts denounced by the letter of the law but performed by persons previously undis-posed to them under the impulse of a criminal intent planted in their minds by the government. Sorrells v. United States, 287 U.S. 435, 442, 53 S.Ct. 210, 212, 77 L.Ed. 413 (1932).
To have sustained that defense in Henry’s case then, the jury would have been required, not only to disbelieve Henry’s sworn testimony that he acted without the specific intent that forms the core and crucial element of the offense with which he was charged,1 but to believe instead, not only that Henry acted with precisely the specific intent that he swore he did not harbor, but that the intent which he swore he did not have originated with the government. In short, Henry claims the right to swear that he had no criminal intent and in the same breath to argue that he had one that did not originate with him. Finding these positions not “impermissibly incon*215sistent,” the majority reverses Henry’s conviction and endorses such tactics for use in our Circuit.
Because I am scarcely able to conceive of positions more inconsistent than these— that Henry both did and did not have a specific intent — I am unable to grasp the usage of “impermissibly” in the majority opinion. Indeed, if what the majority sanctions today is “permissible,” I cannot identify what is not. After today, it is open to the wisely counseled guilty criminal defendant to take the stand and swear to whatever seems tactically indicated, presenting the jury with a true smorgasbord of conflicting defenses: I hadn’t the requisite criminal intent; I have an alibi; I was insane; I was entrapped.2
Nothing in Supreme Court authority constrains us to adopt such a rule. This the majority correctly recognizes, noting “the absence of Supreme Court guidance....” (At 211). Nor do our own authorities, which are in conflict and do not, in any event, bind us sitting en banc. The majority embraces it freely, as a pure matter of policy choice.
Such a rule, in my view, trivializes “the common goal of all trials, ... to arrive at the truth.” Henderson v. United States, 237 F.2d 169, 172 (5th Cir.1956). To me, it is redolent of the sporting theory of justice and denigrates a criminal trial’s “moral content and ... ultimate concern with guilt or innocence that are inconsistent with permitting the accused to say ‘I didn’t do it, but if I did, the government tricked me into it,’ ” United States v. Rey, 706 F.2d 145, 147 (5th Cir.1983), citing United States v. Brooks, 611 F.2d 614 (5th Cir.1980). I would not hear a criminal defendant swear to one thing and argue another, wholly inconsistent one. Since the majority opinion approves that tactic, I respectfully dissent.

Flaws in the Majority’s Reasoning

I have noted my disagreement with the majority’s declaration that, while doubtless inconsistent, it is not “impermissibly” inconsistent to permit a criminal defendant to swear one way about his intent and argue another. I find other difficulties in the process by which it arrives at that position.
Much authority, none of it of great relevance, is discussed by the majority along the way.3 From it the majority derives various concerns, among them the notion that requiring concessions of a defendant as a price for his asserting the entrapment defense would “raise a serious fifth amendment question.” (At 211, citing United States v. Annese, 631 F.2d 1041 (1st Cir.1980)). If this be so, I do not understand by what warrant the majority requires — as it does — a testifying defendant to concede the acts charged as elements of the crime before granting him the defense. (At 209). The same constitutional spectre that the majority views with dread seems to me to be raised by requiring any concession as a price for obtaining the defense, so that if the concern expressed is justified, I do not see how the majority concludes that anything short of. the Ninth Circuit’s rule, which requires no concession whatever, can satisfy it. United States v. Demma, 523 F.2d 981 (9th Cir.1975) (en banc).4
*216Nor am I able to divine by what process the majority selects the essential element of intent as that which can properly be denied in testimony but assumed (at the least) in jury argument. In many eases, as in this one, a concession of the physical acts constituting elements of the charged offense is scarcely a concession at all; even so, the acts are as much elements of the crime as is the specific intent. I see no ground for such a distinction but expedience: it is simply easier and more plausible to double-talk a mental state — of which the defendant alone has direct knowledge— than to contend that one both did and did not deliver a particular bottle of prescription drugs on a given date.
As nearly as I can identify the majority’s proffered reason for this distinction, it seems to be that “intent necessarily has an amorphous and subjective quality that permits reasonable people, even the defendant and the jurors, fairly to disagree over whether his intent was criminal at the time the act was committed.” (At 214, emphasis added). I am far from sure what is meant by this passage.
In the first place, I see nothing amorphous (“indeterminate, formless, unorganized”) about the specific intent required to be proved to convict Henry of the offense with which he was charged: it was that he knowingly sold prescription drugs for non-medical use. In the second, insofar as the passage may be read to suggest that the defendant himself may not know whether he acted with the requisite intent, it has no application to Henry. There may well be defendants who are unsure of their motives, but Henry is not one of them. This case does not involve a defendant honestly uncertain of why he acted as he did. It concerns Henry, who stated clearly, explicitly, specifically, and under oath that he acted without criminal intent. There was nothing amorphous about Henry’s testimony, and, in Henry’s own mind, nothing amorphous about his intent. The majority’s position may be-valid as to a confused defendant; it is clearly invalid as to a defendant like Henry who is sure enough of his intent to swear to it.
Finally, if the passage means that the jury may disbelieve the defendant’s sworn testimony that he did not knowingly sell prescription drugs for recreational purposes, but believe that the criminal intent with which he did so was not his but that of the government, then it is a mere restatement of one consequence that the majority rule can produce — and not a reason for adopting it. Indeed, it is this very consequence that, in my view, should not be entertained in a proceeding so serious as a criminal trial: that a defendant take the stand, solemnly swear to one thing, argue the contrary of his sworn testimony, and be acquitted on the latter basis.

The Effect of the Majority Rule

Although I am unable to discern in the majority opinion a reason for adopting the rule, I have little difficulty in foreseeing the effect of doing so. Unique to our jurisprudence and heretofore of narrow scope, the entrapment defense now bids fair to become a standard, alternative defense in that class of cases which requires the use of informants and undercover police work — those arising from the pernicious and proliferating market in illegal drugs, among others. I see neither policy nor reason in tilting such proceedings further away from the pursuit of truth and more toward sporting contests in which the defendant is allowed to swear to one state of facts and contend for other, inconsistent ones as well. It can never be true that a defendant both had and did not have a specific criminal intent on any given occasion. It cannot be true in Harold Henry’s case; and since it cannot be true, I do not see why we should entertain a claim by him that it is. I therefore respectfully dissent.

. The physical acts themselves, of handing over drugs upon presentation of a physician’s prescription, are in no sense criminal or malum in se. Admitting these, as “required" by the majority opinion, is therefore scarcely an admission of any kind: criminal intent is the essence of the offense and is denied by Henry under oath.

. One wonders if such latitude would be exercised even in a civil case; one, say, in which a defendant swore unequivocally that he never borrowed the cracked pot and at the same time sought a jury interrogatory asking whether it was not already cracked when he borrowed it.

. Honesty requires the concession, however, that the majority is correct in rejecting the view that today’s entrapment defense is one in the nature of confession and avoidance, a view sometimes espoused in our earlier authorities, e.g., Siglar v. United States, 208 F.2d 865, 868 (5th Cir.1953). As now perceived by the Supreme Court, it is instead a claim that what was done was not a crime at all, having been done with an intent supplied by the government, and that, however literally it may have denounced it, Congress could not have meant to punish such an act. Apparently, the Court regards such an intent as negotiable, but not without recourse.

. The short answer to these concerns is that entrapment, being a defense devised by the courts and — as the majority observe — grounded in statutory construction rather than the Constitution, is accessible on such terms as the courts — and ultimately the Court — find appropriate.