Source: s3://data.kl3m.ai/documents/govinfo/USCOURTS/USCOURTS-ca10-88-01423/USCOURTS-ca10-88-01423-0/pdf.json

Nature of Suit Code: 530
Nature of Suit: Prisoner Petitions - Habeas Corpus
Cause of Action: 

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PUBLISH FILED 

UNITED STATES COURT OF APPEALS Unitad Stataa Court of Appeals Tenth Circuit 

TENTH CIRCUIT JUL 0 31989 

ROBERT L. HOECKER 

Clerk 

GEORGE D. BUCK, 

Petitioner-Appellant, 

v. 

HERB MASCHNER, and ATTORNEY 

GENERAL OF THE STATE OF 

KANSAS, 

Respondents~Appellees, 

NATIONAL ASSOCIATION OF 

CRIMINAL DEFENSE LAWYERS, 

Amicus Curiae. 

88-1423 

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On Appeal From The 

United States District Court 

For The District Of Kansas 

(D.C. No. 86-3273-S} 

David R. Gilman, (James F. Vano, on the brief), Overland Park, 

Kansas, for Petitioner-Appellant. 

John K. Bork, Assistant Attorney General (Robert T. Stephan, 

Attorney General, and Brenda L. Braden, Deputy Attorney General, 

on the brief), Topeka, Kansas, for Respondents-Appellees. 

Steven G. Farber, Santa· Fe, New Mexico, on the brief for Amicus 

Curiae. 

Before HOLLOWAY, Chief Judge, SETH and TACHA, Circuit Judges. 

SETH, Circuit Judge. 

Appellate Case: 88-1423 Document: 01019743426 Date Filed: 07/03/1989 Page: 1 
George D. Buck ("petitioner") appeals the district court's 

order denying his petition for a writ of habeas corpus. 

Petitioner contends that the introduction of evidence used in a 

prior alleged molestation of children charge for which he had been 

tried and acquitted, violated his constitutional rights. 

In the prior charge, in August 1982, petitioner was accused 

of taking indecent liberties with three children, Deborah, Damien, 

and Danyelle, in violation of Kan. Stat. Ann. § 21-3503. At his 

trial in April 1983, the three children testified to events that 

allegedly occurred when petitioner visited their house to tune a 

piano. Specifically, they testified that petitioner touched two 

of them in their genital areas and kissed the third on her breast. 

Petitioner was acquitted. 

In January 1984, petitioner was charged with taking indecent 

liberties with another child, Casey. At this trial, the three 

children from the 1983 trial again testified for the State 

concerning the 1982 incident involving petitioner.· The trial 

court gave a limiting instruction to the jury before the three 

children testified, stating that the testimony of the children 

should be considered solely for the purpose of proving 

petitioner's motive or intent, or the absence of mistake or 

accident. The children's testimony was essentially identical to 

their testimony at the earlier trial. The State also called 

Detective Melvin Richey, who had investigated the 1982 incident, 

but who was not involved in the investigation of the case being 

tried. All told, four of the seven witnesses whom the State 

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Appellate Case: 88-1423 Document: 01019743426 Date Filed: 07/03/1989 Page: 2 
called in this trial testified to events that formed the basis of 

the earlier trial. After exhausting his State court remedies, 

petitioner filed for habeas corpus relief in the United States 

District Court for the District of Kansas, pursuant to 28 u.s.c. 

§ 2254. 

In Ashe v. Swenson, 397 U.S. 436, 443-44, the Supreme Court 

established that the Fifth Amendment guarantee against double 

jeopardy, applicable to the states through the Fourteenth 

Amendment, embodies collateral estoppel as a constitutional 

requirement. Ashe involved an early morning robbery of a poker 

game taking place in a private residence. Four suspects were 

tried for the robbery of one of the poker players, and all but one 

of them were convicted. The fourth suspect, Ashe, was tried a 

second time for the robbery of a second poker player. In the 

second trial, the Government refined its case, the witnesses were 

more convincing, and Ashe was convicted. 

The Court in Ashe adopted a collateral estoppel doctrine for 

criminal cases based on ''realism and rationality," rather than on 

the hypertechnical considerations historically associated with the 

doctrine. Under Ashe, a court considering whether to admit 

evidence of conduct that formed the basis of a previous trial and 

judgment of acquittal must 

"examine the record of [the] prior proceeding, 

taking into account the pleadings, evidence, 

charge, and other relevant matter, and 

conclude whether a rational jury could have 

grounded its verdict upon an issue other than 

that which the defendant seeks to foreclose 

from consideration." 

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Appellate Case: 88-1423 Document: 01019743426 Date Filed: 07/03/1989 Page: 3 
In the case before it, the Court determined that the single issue 

in the first trial had been whether Ashe was one of the robbers, 

and that the jury's verdict of acquittal had laid to rest that 

issue. Therefore, the Court held that the second prosecution was 

"wholly impermissible" in the light of the Fifth Amendment 

guarantee against double jeopardy. 

The Supreme Court in Ashe did not directly address whether 

the constitutional collateral estoppel doctrine is limited to 

reprosecutions based on the same conduct, or if it applies as well 

to the use in an unrelated trial of evidence of a prior charge 

upon which the defendant has been acquitted. Our opinion in 

Abramson v. Griffin, 693 F.2d 1009, 1011 (10th Cir.), stated 

broadly that the doctrine bars the relitigation of an ultimate 

fact already disposed of by a valid and final judgment in a 

criminal case. But Abramson, like Ashe, concerned a reprosecution 

based on essentially the same acts as those upon which the 

defendant had previously been acquitted. In other cases, we have 

allowed the introduction of such evidence when it arises from 

events related to, but distinct from, conduct constituting the 

offense for which the defendant is charged. See United States v. 

Sutton, 732 F.2d 1483, 1489 (10th Cir.) (allowing evidence where 

defendant was acquitted on several counts of a multi-count 

indictment and was being retried on other counts); United States 

v. Van Cleave, 599 F.2d 954, 957 (10th Cir.) (allowing evidence 

concerning previous conduct, for which the defendant had been 

tried and acquitted, where it was "an inseparable part of the 

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Appellate Case: 88-1423 Document: 01019743426 Date Filed: 07/03/1989 Page: 4 
( transaction" for which the defendant was being tried}; see also 

United States v. Gentile, 816 F.2d 1157 (7th Cir.}; United States 

v. Gutierrez, 696 F.2d 753, 755 n.2 (10th Cir.} (allowing evidence 

of prior conduct where defendant had not been acquitted on charges 

stemming from that conduct at the time of trial}. Those cases, 

however, are quite different. 

A number of circuits hold that evidence of alleged prior 

criminal wrongdoing, for which a defendant has been tried and 

acquitted, is not admissible for any purpose. Albert v. 

Montgomery, 732 F.2d 865, 869-70 (11th Cir.}; United States v. 

Mespoulede, 597 F.2d 329, 335 (2d Cir.}; Wingate v. Wainwright, 

464 F.2d 209, 213-14 (5th Cir.). The Third Circuit has declined 

to embrace a broad constitutional rule, but has reached much the 

same result by following its pre-Ashe collateral estoppel cases 

that barred the same kind of evidence. United States v. Dowling, 

855 F.2d 114, 121-22 (3d Cir.), cert. granted, 109 s. Ct. 1309. 

The Third Circuit's approach is directed to cases in the federal 

courts. In the case before us Kansas is free to fashion its own 

rules for criminal cases, short of contravening the collateral 

estoppel requirements of the double jeopardy clause. 

Allowing the Government to introduce evidence such as that 

introduced here poses two related threats to a defendant's Fifth 

Amendment rights. First, the Government might bring a second case 

that it otherwise would not bring but for the evidence of a prior 

incident--of which the defendant was acquitted--and thus subject 

him to ''repetitive and harassing lawsuits." See United States v. 

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Appellate Case: 88-1423 Document: 01019743426 Date Filed: 07/03/1989 Page: 5 
Standefer, 610 F.2d 1076, 1092 (3d Cir.), aff'd, 447 U.S. 10. The 

Government may view scant evidence of a subsequent violation of 

the law as an opportunity to present evidence of the defendant's 

prior alleged wrongdoing to a second jury. Second, a jury may 

convict the defendant, not based on the evidence of the offense 

for which he is charged, but based on the evidence of the prior 

incident. An accusation that a defendant has once before 

committed the act for which he is charged can be the most 

devastating aspect of the State's evidence. See Albert, 732 F.2d 

at 871. As this evidence "looms larger in the Government's case, 

it becomes more likely that the matter will prove decisive in the 

jury's deliberations." Mespoulede, 597 F.2d at 335. 

Respondents contend that the evidence from the early incident 

was properly introduced to show intent or absence of mistake or 

accident. Respondents argue that such evidence was necessary to 

rebut petitioner's defense that, if there had been a touching, it 

was not intended to arouse or satisfy petitioner's sexual desires 

in violation of the Kansas statute under which he was prosecuted. 

In fact, while accident had been petitioner's defense in the early 

trial, in the later trial petitioner denied that the touching 

occurred at all. Even had petitioner defended on the basis of 

accident, what was the earlier trial evidence offered to prove? 

The State characterized the evidence in a pretrial memorandum: 

"The prior case would buttress the State's 

case • • • • Simply, the defendant's touching 

• • • was not an accident or playful gesture 

but was done with criminal intent and 

knowledge of wrongdoing for the defendant did 

this same or similar acts in a prior identical 

situation." 

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Appellate Case: 88-1423 Document: 01019743426 Date Filed: 07/03/1989 Page: 6 
The State hoped to establish both that touchings occurred in the 

prior incident, and that the touchings were not accidents but 

rather the means by which petitioner intended to arouse or satisfy 

his sexual desires. The fact of the matter was that there was no 

crime established in the earlier situation and for our purposes. 

The jury decided that the incident did not occur. 

The State trial court, reviewing the earlier case as required 

under Kansas law, suggested that the jury based its acquittal on 

the credibility, or lack of credibility, of the witnesses. This 

aspect of a prior trial--calling as it does for an observation of 

the witnesses' demeanor while testifying--is perhaps the least 

accessible to a court later reviewing the record. In any event, 

should the prosecution be permitted to have a second jury examine 

credibility again? Furthermore, every jury decision to a greater 

or lesser extent calls for credibility determinations. The Court 

in Ashe even indicated that the petitioner's first trial may have 

turned on the prosecution witnesses' credibility. Ashe, 397 U.S. 

at 439-40 (observing that in Ashe's second trial "[t]he witnesses 

were for the most part the same, though this time their testimony 

was substantially stronger"). Allowing such damaging evidence in 

on such thin ground substantially undermines the protection of the 

collateral estoppel doctrine. But beyond that, when a jury finds 

that the State's evidence is not credible, that means that the 

State has not proved its case. Witness credibility in a previous 

trial is no basis upon which to force a defendant to relitigate a 

matter that he has previously overcome. 

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Appellate Case: 88-1423 Document: 01019743426 Date Filed: 07/03/1989 Page: 7 
As mentioned, four of the seven witnesses called at the 

second trial had testified at the first trial. Their testimony 

was essentially the same in both trials. In our view, the second 

trial reached a point where the prosecution was retrying the 

defendant as in the first case wherein the jury had acquitted him 

by a general verdict. 

Constitutional collateral estoppel applies to the evidence 

the State introduced in this case to exclude it. We cannot 

understand how a rational jury could have grounded a verdict in 

the later trial upon an issue other than the two essential issues 

in contention--whether a touching occurred, whether the touching 

was intentional--both of which the State sought to establish in 

the earlier trial. See Ashe, 397 U.S. at 444. The State 

impermissibly sought to prove exactly what it failed to prove in 

the previous trial. The trial court's error in admitting the 

evidence could not possibly have been harmless, as the evidence 

represented the bulk of the State's case. 

For the reasons stated the judgment of the district court is 

REVERSED and the case is REMANDED with directions that the writ 

issue in accordance with the mandate to be issued forthwith. 

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