At 10 p.m. on February 25, Hampton and Hutton met the undercover Sawyer and another DEA agent, McDowell, and sold him a tiny packet of heroin for $145.

He claimed Hutton had, in response to his cash flow problems, come up with the idea to sell not heroin but a fake, perfectly legal, he thought.

Previous to the deals with the DEA the two had, he said, already sold it to one gullible buyer and that he solicited the agents in order to make more money.

The Court thereby rejected Hampton's argument that, whatever his predisposition, the conduct of the government operatives in his narrative was outrageous enough to trump it.

He conceded that the government's role, at least in the defense case, was more significant but stuck with the admitted predisposition towards drug dealing in rejecting any entrapment claim.

"The limitations of the Due Process Clause of the Fifth Amendment come into play only when the Government activity in question violates some protected right of the defendant", he wrote, in a comment read as scaling back his Russell aside.

While likewise rejecting Hampton's defense, Lewis Powell and Harry Blackmun took issue with what they saw as Rehnquist's overly broad assertion that (as they put it), "the concept of fundamental fairness inherent in the guarantee of due process would never prevent the conviction of a predisposed defendant, regardless of the outrageousness of police behavior in light of the surrounding circumstances."

"I do not understand Russell or earlier cases delineating the predisposition-focused defense of entrapment to have gone so far", Powell wrote.

He noted that the jurisprudence was very limited, and that the Court had, for one, not yet had the opportunity to consider an entrapment claim from some source other than controlled-substance enforcement.

William Brennan made the argument once again for the "objective" entrapment standard from previous concurrences and dissents, and said that this would necessitate overturning the conviction.

There is little, if any, law enforcement interest promoted by such conduct; plainly it is not designed to discover ongoing drug traffic.