Sorrells v. United States

The Court distinguished lawful undercover work from impermissible entrapment. Officers may use decoys, deception, artifice, and opportunities to expose a criminal design that already exists. But the Government crosses the line when its officers conceive the criminal scheme, implant the disposition to commit the offense in an innocent person, and induce the offense solely to prosecute that person.

The Court grounded the defense in statutory construction rather than a judicial power to excuse an admittedly guilty defendant. General statutory language should not be read literally when that reading produces an unjust or absurd result contrary to the statute's purpose. Congress enacted prohibition laws to detect and punish unlawful liquor traffic, not to permit officials to manufacture crimes by luring law-abiding citizens into illegal acts.

Construing the statute to exclude crimes created by government inducement preserves the separation of powers. A court may interpret a criminal statute according to its purpose, but it may not treat a valid and applicable statute as creating guilt and then independently grant immunity or refuse to enforce it. Clemency belongs to the Executive, not the judiciary.

The defense has a built-in limit: it does not apply whenever an officer requests or facilitates an illegal act. The defendant's predisposition and prior criminal design remain relevant because the controlling question is whether the Government merely exposed a willing offender or instead created the offense by overcoming the resistance of a person otherwise innocent.

The evidence supported a finding that the prohibition agent initiated and persistently pursued the whiskey transaction. Sorrells initially denied dealing in liquor, and only after repeated requests did he agree to try to obtain whiskey.

A jury could also find that the agent deliberately exploited a relationship of trust and shared wartime camaraderie. The agent presented himself as a fellow veteran of Sorrells's division and used that connection while repeatedly requesting liquor, allowing the inference that Sorrells acted as a favor to a former comrade rather than from a preexisting criminal purpose.

Sorrells introduced evidence that he had worked continuously for years, possessed a good reputation, and had no proven history of possessing or selling liquor. Although the Government offered reputation testimony that he was a rum-runner, that conflict in the evidence was for the jury to resolve. The trial judge therefore could not rule as a matter of law that entrapment was absent.

The Government's proposed special-plea requirement rested on the mistaken premise that an entrapped defendant admits guilt but invokes a separate bar to punishment, like a pardon or former acquittal. Under the Court's statutory approach, however, a government-created offense falls outside the intended reach of the statute.

Because entrapment challenges whether the charged conduct can properly constitute a prosecutable offense under the statute in the circumstances, it is appropriately litigated in the ordinary criminal trial under a not-guilty plea. The defendant may present evidence of official inducement, and the Government may respond with pertinent evidence bearing on the defendant's predisposition.