Charles Evans Hughes

“ The argument, from the standpoint of principle, is that the court is called upon to try the accused for a particular offense which is defined by statute and that, if the evidence shows that this offense has knowingly been committed, it matters not that its commission was induced by officers of the government in the manner and circumstances assumed. It is said that where one intentionally does an act in circumstances known to him, and the particular conduct is forbidden by the law in those circumstances, he intentionally breaks the law in the only sense in which the law considers intent. ”

“ The broad distinction between the refusal to lend the aid of the court's own processes to the consummation of a wrong and the attempt to modify by judicial legislation the mandate of the statute as to the punishment to be imposed after trial and conviction is so obvious as not to need discussion. ”

“ Thus it has been held that the acts of its officers estop the government to prove the offense. The result has also been justified by the mere statement of the rule that where entrapment is proved the defendant is not guilty of the crime charged. Often the defense has been permitted upon grounds of public policy, which the courts formulate by saying they will not permit their process to be used in aid of a scheme for the actual creation of a crime by those whose duty is to deter its commission. ”

“ Of late the term 'entrapment' has been adopted by the courts to signify instigation of crime by officers of government. The cases in which such incitement has been recognized as a defense have grown to an amazing total. [8] The increasing frequency of the assertion that the defendant was entrapped is doubtless due to the creation by statute of many new crimes (e.g., sale and transportation of liquor and narcotics) and the correlative establishment of special enforcement bodies for the detection and punishment of offenders. ”

“ When courts of law refuse to sustain alleged causes of action which grow out of illegal schemes, the applicable law itself denies the right to recover. Where courts of equity refuse equitable relief because complainants come with unclean hands, they are administering the principles of equitable jurisprudence governing equitable rights. But in a criminal prosecution, the statute defining the offense is necessarily the law of the case. ”

“ Society is at war with the criminal classes, and courts have uniformly held that in waging this warfare the forces of prevention and detection may use traps, decoys, and deception to obtain evidence of the commission of crime. Resort to such means does not render an indictment thereafter found a nullity nor call for the exclusion of evidence so procured. [9] But the defense here asserted involves more than obtaining evidence by artifice or deception. ”

“ Recognition of the defense of entrapment as belonging to the defendant and as raising an issue for decision by the jury called to try him upon plea of the general issue, results in the trial of a false issue wholly outside the true rule which should be applied by the courts. It has been generally held, where the defendant has proved an entrapment, it is permissible for the government to show in rebuttal that the officer guilty of incitement of the crime had reasonable cause to believe the defendant was a person disposed to commit the offense. ”

“ The Circuit Court of Appeals reached the conclusion that the defense of entrapment can be maintained only where, as a result of inducement, the accused is placed in the attitude of having committed a crime which he did not intend to commit, or where, by reason of the consent implied in the inducement, no crime has in fact been committed. ”

“ We are dealing with a statutory prohibition and we are simply concerned to ascertain whether in the light of a plain public policy and of the proper administration of justice, conduct induced as stated should be deemed to be within that prohibition. We have no occasion to consider hypothetical cases of crimes so heinous or revolting that the applicable law would admit of no exceptions. ”

“ To the suggestion of public policy the objectors answer that the Legislature, acting within its constitutional authority, is the arbiter of public policy [6] and that, where conduct is expressly forbidden and penalized by a valid statute, the courts are not at liberty to disregard the law and to bar a prosecution for its violation because they are of the opinion that the crime has been instigated by government officials. ”

“ But decoys are not permissible to ensnare the innocent and lawabiding into the commission of crime. When the criminal design originates, not with the accused, but is conceived in the mind of the government officers, and the accused is by persuasion, deceitful representation, or inducement lured into the commission of a criminal act, the government is estopped by sound public policy from prosecution therefor.' These quotations sufficiently indicate the grounds of the decisions above cited. ”

“ Where defendant has been duly indicted for an offense found to be within the statute, and the proper authorities seek to proceed with the prosecutioin, the court cannot refuse to try the case in the constitutional method because it desires to let the defendant go free. ”

“ The government maintains that the issue of entrapment is not triable under the plea of not guilty, but should be raised by plea in bar or be adjudicated in some manner by the court rather than by the jury, and as the trial court properly decided the question, the record presents no reversible error. ”

“ Entrapment is the conception and planning of an offense by an officer, and his procurement of its commission by one who would not have perpetrated it except for the trickery, persuasion, or fraud of the officer. Federal and state courts have held that substantial proof of entrapment as thus defined calls for the submission of the issue to the jury and warrants an acquittal. ”

“ The government in such a case is in no position to object to evidence of the activities of its representatives in relation to the accused, and if the defendant seeks acquittal by reason of entrapment he cannot complain of an appropriate and searching inquiry into his own conduct and predisposition as bearing upon that issue. If in consequence he suffers a disadvantage, he has brought it upon himself by reason of the nature of the defense. ”

“ To construe statutes so as to avoid absurd or glaringly unjust results, foreign to the legislative purpose, is, as we have seen, a traditional and appropriate function of the courts. Judicial nullification of statutes, admittedly valid and applicable, has, happily, no place in our system. ”

“ We think that this established principle of construction is applicable here. We are unable to conclude that it was the intention of the Congress in enacting this statute that its processes of detection and enforcement should be abused by the instigation by government officials of an act on the part of persons otherwise innocent in order to lure them to its commission and to punish them. We are not forced by the letter to do violence to the spirit and purpose of the statute. ”

“ Always the courts refuse their aid in civil cases to the perpetration and consummation of an illegal scheme. Invariably they hold a civil action must be abated if its basis is violation of the decencies of life, disregard of the rules, statutory or common law, which formulate the ethics of men's relations to each other. ”

“ There may also be physical conditions which are essential to the offense and which do not exist in the case of a trap, as, for example, in the case of a prosecution for burglary where it appears that by reason of the trap there is no breaking. ”

“ Defendant called as witnesses the three persons who had accompanied the prohibition agent. In substance, they corroborated the latter's story but with some additions. Jones, a railroad employee, testified that he had introduced the agent to the defendant 'as a furniture dealer of Charlotte,' because the agent had so represented himself ”