Court ok’s
police role
in dealing
WASHINGTON (AP) — The Supreme
Court ruled Tuesday that a person may
be convicted of selling drugs illegally
even if an undercover agent supplied the
contraband and another bought it.
The justices divided three ways in
their 5-3 decision. Three justices said a
defendant who is predisposed to commit
a crime can never escape conviction by
pleading police entrapment of this kind.
Justices Lewis F. Powell Jr. and Harry
Blackmun, however, refused to go that
far, saying such a rule would permit a
high school student selling drugs to
classmates to be convicted despite “the
most outrageous conduct conceivable”
by government agents.
Powell and Blackmun nevertheless
agreed to uphold the conviction of
Charles Hampton of St. Louis, who tes
tified that a government informer sup
plied him with heroin which he sold to
undercover narcotics agents.
Justices William J. Brennan Jr., Potter
Stewart and Thurgood Marshall dis
sented, saying the government was
"doing nothing less than buying con
traband from itself through an inter
mediary and jailing the intermediary.”
Speaking for the three justices who
signed the court’s plurality opinion, Jus
tice William H. Rehnquist said Hampton
was not entitled to claim that his constitu
tional right to due process of law had
been violated.
“If the police engage in illegal activity
in concert with a defendant beyond the
scope of their duties, the remedy lies,
not in freeing the equally culpable de
fendant, but in prosecuting the police,"
Rehnquist said.
Joining him in the opinion were Chief
Justice Warren E. Burger and Justice
Byron R. White.
The decision in the contraband case
marked an extension of a doctrine which
the court established in 1973, when it
upheld the conviction of a man who had
been supplied by government agents
with a legally obtainable chemical used
in the manufacture of illegal drugs.
In that 5 to 4 decision, the justices in
the majority were the same ones who
voted to uphold Hampton’s conviction.
In 1973 they left open the possibility that
conduct of law enforcement officers in
some future case might be “so outra
geous” that it would require reversing a
conviction on constitutional grounds.
Justice John Paul Stevens did not
vote on the case, on which the court
heard arguments Dec. 1, before his ap
pointment. Justice William O. Douglas,
whom he succeeded, voted with the dis
senters in the 1973 case.
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