However, while the majority opinion by Chief Justice Charles Evans Hughes located the key to entrapment in the defendant's predisposition or lack thereof to commit the crime, Owen Roberts' concurring opinion proposed instead that it be rooted in an analysis of the conduct of the law enforcement agents making the arrest.

In 1930, Martin, a Prohibition agent in Haywood County, North Carolina, heard from informers that Vaughno Crawford Sorrells, a factory worker at Champion Fiber Company in Canton, had a reputation as a rumrunner.

He had them introduce him to Sorrells as a fellow veteran of the U.S. Army 30th Infantry Division who had served in World War I and was passing through the area.

At several times during an hour and a half of conversation and reminiscing the agent asked Sorrells if he would be so kind as to get a fellow soldier some liquor.

Roberts' concurrence, joined by Harlan Fiske Stone and Louis Brandeis, took strong issue with this finding: This seems a strained and unwarranted construction of the statute; and amounts, in fact, to judicial amendment.