406
Opinion of the Court
an interrogator to press the liar from the initial simple denial to a more detailed fabrication that would not qualify for the exemption.
III
A brief word in response to the dissent's assertion that the Court may interpret a criminal statute more narrowly than it is written: Some of the cases it cites for that proposition represent instances in which the Court did not purport to be departing from a reasonable reading of the text, United States v. X-Citement Video, Inc., 513 U. S. 64, 77-78 (1994); Williams v. United States, 458 U. S. 279, 286-287 (1982). In the others, the Court applied what it thought to be a background interpretive principle of general application. Staples v. United States, 511 U. S. 600, 619 (1994) (construing statute to contain common-law requirement of mens rea); Sorrells v. United States, 287 U. S. 435, 446 (1932) (construing statute not to cover violations produced by entrapment); United States v. Palmer, 3 Wheat. 610, 631 (1818) (construing statute not to apply extraterritorially to noncitizens). Also into this last category falls the dissent's correct assertion that the present statute does not "mak[e] it a crime for an undercover narcotics agent to make a false statement to a drug peddler." Post, at 419 (opinion of Stevens, J.). Criminal prohibitions do not generally apply to reasonable enforcement actions by officers of the law. See, e. g., 2 P. Robinson, Criminal Law Defenses § 142(a), p. 121 (1984) ("Every American jurisdiction recognizes some form of law enforcement authority justification").
It is one thing to acknowledge and accept such well defined (or even newly enunciated), generally applicable, background principles of assumed legislative intent. It is quite another to espouse the broad proposition that criminal statutes do not have to be read as broadly as they are written, but are subject to case-by-case exceptions. The problem with adopting such an expansive, user-friendly judicial rule is that there is no way of knowing when, or how, the rule is to be
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