Sorrells v. United States
The Supreme Court ruled that a man who sold liquor to a prohibition agent only after the agent repeatedly badgered him and invoked their shared service as World War I veterans was entitled to have a jury consider whether he had been entrapped into the crime.
The decision recognized, for the first time at the Supreme Court, that federal law does not allow the government to manufacture a crime in someone with no prior inclination to commit it and then prosecute him for it — establishing the entrapment defense in federal criminal law.
“A different question is presented when the criminal design originates with the officials of the Government, and they implant in the mind of an innocent person the disposition to commit the alleged offense and induce its commission in order that they may prosecute.”
The Court's core distinction between legitimate sting operations and unlawful entrapment.
How it got here: A jury convicted the man after the trial judge refused to let the jury consider entrapment; the Fourth Circuit affirmed, and the Supreme Court took the case to decide if entrapment should have gone to the jury.
The Case in Depth
What happened
A prohibition agent, posing as a tourist and fellow World War I veteran, visited a man's home in North Carolina and, over roughly an hour, asked him three to five times to get him liquor. The man, who had no history of dealing liquor and was a steadily employed factory worker with a good reputation, eventually left and returned with a half-gallon of whiskey, which he sold to the agent for five dollars. He was then charged with possessing and selling liquor.
The question before the Court
If a prohibition agent repeatedly begged a war veteran, playing on their shared military service, until he finally got him liquor, could the veteran still be convicted of selling it?
Why it matters
The ruling gives defendants nationwide a real legal tool to fight back when government agents pressure otherwise law-abiding people into breaking the law just to arrest them. It puts limits on undercover and sting-style law enforcement tactics, and it guarantees that juries — not just judges — get to decide whether that line was crossed.
What changes now
The case goes back for a new trial at which the jury, not the judge, will decide whether the defendant was entrapped. This is a final decision on the legal question of whether entrapment can be raised and tried under a plea of not guilty; it resolves a split among the federal appeals courts but leaves the eventual outcome of this particular prosecution to be decided on retrial.
What this does not decide
The Court did not decide what result should follow in cases involving especially serious or "heinous" crimes, and it left open exactly how courts should weigh a defendant's prior bad reputation or past conduct once entrapment is shown. It also did not adopt Justice Roberts's proposed rule that judges, rather than juries, should always control the entrapment question.
Concurrences and dissents
Dissent — Justice McReynolds
Justice McReynolds stated only that he believed the judgment below should be affirmed, without providing supporting reasoning in the opinion.
Concurrence — Justice Roberts
Justice Roberts agreed the conviction should be reversed but rejected the majority's approach of reading an implied exception into the statute itself. He argued entrapment should instead rest on the court's inherent power to protect the purity of its own processes and refuse to be used as an instrument of government-created crime, meaning judges rather than juries should control the issue, and that a defendant's bad reputation or prior conduct should not matter once entrapment is proven.
How the Court got there
The legal reasoning, step by step
- The Court distinguished between government agents merely giving a criminal-minded person the chance to break the law — which is permissible — and government agents planting the idea of the crime in an innocent person's mind and then luring him to commit it, which raises the separate question of entrapment.
- The Court surveyed the lower federal courts and found that every circuit except one already recognized entrapment as a defense when the government's own agents originate the criminal design and induce an otherwise innocent person to carry it out.
- Rather than reading a defense into the statute as an exception the way lower courts had, the Court reasoned that Congress could not have intended a law against liquor sales to reach conduct manufactured entirely by the government's own officers, since applying the statute that way would produce a result foreign to its purpose.
- Relying on a long line of cases holding that literal statutory language should not be applied where doing so would create absurd or unjust results the legislature could not have intended, the Court concluded that entrapment falls outside what Congress meant to punish, so it is a matter of statutory interpretation rather than a court's inherent power to dismiss cases.
- Because the defendant is treated as not guilty rather than as guilty-but-excused, the Court held that entrapment could be raised under an ordinary not-guilty plea and tried to the jury like any other factual defense, rather than requiring a separate pretrial plea in bar.
- Applying this framework to the facts, the Court found the evidence — an agent's repeated requests over more than an hour, exploiting a bond of shared war service with a man of no prior liquor dealings and good standing in his community — was enough that a jury could find entrapment, so the trial judge erred by deciding the issue himself and taking it away from the jury.
Doctrinal impact
Cases affected by this decision
Reaffirms Ex parte United States (242 U. S. 27)
Reaffirmed that courts cannot invent power to suspend sentences or excuse guilty defendants outside what the law allows.