hung jury

Yeager v. United States

Issues

Does collateral estoppel prevent a prosecutor from retrying a defendant on charges where the jury in a previous trial failed to reach a unanimous verdict, if that jury acquitted the defendant on other counts that share essential factual elements with the hung charges?

 

The doctrine of collateral estoppel prevents two parties from re-litigating an issue of fact determined in a prior proceeding. In criminal law, this doctrine is incorporated into the Double Jeopardy Clause of the Fifth Amendment, which prohibits the government from prosecuting an individual twice for substantially the same crime. In 2004, the United States charged three senior executives of Enron Corporation with multiple counts of money laundering, securities fraud, wire fraud, and insider trading. At trial, the jury acquitted the defendants on several charges, but could not agree on a verdict for the rest. The United States then recharged the defendants with several of the crimes on which the jury in the previous trial failed to reach a verdict. The defendants moved to dismiss the charges, arguing that collateral estoppel prevented the government from retrying them. The defendants based their motion on the fact that the jury acquitted the defendants on counts that shared common factual elements with the charges the jury failed to reach a verdict on. The district court denied the defendants’ motion, and the Fifth Circuit upheld the district court’s decision. In this case, the Supreme Court of the United States will decide whether, under the Double Jeopardy Clause, the government may retry defendants acquitted of some charges on factually related counts on which the jury failed to reach a verdict on at a preceding trial. 

Questions as Framed for the Court by the Parties

The courts of appeals are deeply divided as to whether, when conducting the Fifth Amendment collateral estoppel analysis set out by this court in Ashe v. Swenson, 397 U.S. 436 (1970), a court should consider the jury’s failure to reach a verdict on some counts. The issue presented here is:

1. Whether, when a jury acquits a defendant on multiple counts but fails to reach a verdict on other counts that share a common element, and, after a complete review of the record, the court of appeals determines that the only rational basis for the acquittals is that an essential element of the hung counts was determined in the defendant’s favor, collateral estoppel bars a retrial on the hung counts.

In November 2004, the government indicted F. Scott Yeager, Joseph Hirko, and Rex Shelby (“defendants”) on numerous counts of conspiracy to commit securities and wire fraud, securities fraud, wire fraud, insider trading, and money laundering. See United States v. Scott Yeager, 521 F.3d 367, 369 (5th Cir.

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