Warren also found Sherman's efforts to seek treatment, the absence of any drugs in his apartment when it was searched and his failure to profit from the sales to be significant in establishing that he did not have a predisposition to break the law.

He declined to reassess the alternative, objective test of entrapment proposed by Justice Owen Roberts in his Sorrells concurrence, that the focus should be on how the government acted rather than the defendant's state of mind.

He believed that such a focus would unnecessarily burden prosecutors as they would not be able to raise predisposition in response to any defense attempt to examine police conduct; and that lower courts had ruled that juries should be allowed to consider entrapment, not judges as Roberts had proposed.

"To dispose of this case on the ground suggested would entail both overruling a leading decision of this Court and brushing aside the possibility that we would be creating more problems than we would supposedly be solving," he said in conclusion.

"(We fail) to give the doctrine of entrapment the solid foundation that the decisions of the lower courts and criticism of learned writers have clearly shown is needed," he said.

Lower courts, he noted, had either ignored the Sorrells standard altogether and focused on narrow facts of the case, or failed to come up with a generalized rule, which was proof enough that it needed to be reassessed.

"The courts refuse to convict an entrapped defendant, not because his conduct falls outside the proscription of the statute, but because, even if his guilt be admitted, the methods employed on behalf of the Government to bring about conviction cannot be countenanced," he reminded his colleagues, foreshadowing the "outrageous government conduct" theory that Justice William Rehnquist would inadvertently create almost two decades later in United States v. Russell.