Woo Wai v. United States

The plaintiffs in error were convicted under an indictment which charged them with conspiring to bring into the United States from Mexico certain Chinese persons who were not entitled to enter or remain in the United States. The defense on which the defendants relied upon the trial was that they had been lured by *413 government officers into the commission of a seeming violation of the laws of the United States, and that therefore they had committed no offense against those laws. Upon the efficacy of that defense the trial court charged the jury that, if they found the facts to be fully as testified by the defendants, those facts would constitute no legal or valid defense in law to the charge-embraced in the indictment. That instruction is assigned as error.

The facts testified to by the defendants, and so referred to in the charge, together with the facts established by the prosecution, are the following: In October, 1908‘, Fernando Sanford, a confidential agent of the Immigration Commission then in charge of the investigation of offenses in violation of the immigration laws on the Pacific Coast, suspected that Woo Wai, a Chinese merchant who had resided for many years in San…