Cite as: 503 U. S. 540 (1992)
Opinion of the Court
thorization of a judge. Id., Government Exhibit 1. It further asked petitioner to affirm that he was not a Government agent attempting to entrap the mail order company or its customers. Ibid. In these particulars, both Government solicitations suggested that receiving this material was something that petitioner ought to be allowed to do.
Petitioner's ready response to these solicitations cannot be enough to establish beyond reasonable doubt that he was predisposed, prior to the Government acts intended to create predisposition, to commit the crime of receiving child pornography through the mails. See Sherman, 356 U. S., at 374. The evidence that petitioner was ready and willing to commit the offense came only after the Government had devoted 21/2 years to convincing him that he had or should have the right to engage in the very behavior proscribed by law. Rational jurors could not say beyond a reasonable doubt that petitioner possessed the requisite predisposition prior to the Government's investigation and that it existed independent of the Government's many and varied approaches to petitioner. As was explained in Sherman, where entrapment was found as a matter of law, "the Government [may not] pla[y] on the weaknesses of an innocent party and beguil[e] him into committing crimes which he otherwise would not have attempted." Id., at 376.
Law enforcement officials go too far when 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." Sorrells, 287 U. S., at 442 (emphasis added). Like the Sorrells Court, we are "unable to conclude that it was the intention of the Congress in enacting this statute that its processes of detection and enforcement should be abused by the instigation by government officials of an act on the part of persons otherwise innocent in order to lure them to its commission and to punish them." Id., at 448. When the Government's quest for convictions leads to the apprehension of an otherwise law-abiding citizen who, if
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