Opinion ID: 715789
Heading Depth: 4
Heading Rank: 1

Heading: Tradition in Criminal Jurisprudence

Text: 42 We look first to general historical tradition in criminal jurisprudence. Criminal trials have long ensured substantial jury agreement as to the facts establishing the offense. This is because criminal statutes and the common law have generally defined crimes in terms of conduct (and accompanying mental state) that takes place in a single place at some specific time. For example, murder statutes require that the defendant killed some other person, an act occurring in some specified time and place. Thus, when a jury delivers a general guilty verdict for such a crime, we are confident that the jury agreed on most of the actions engaged in by the defendant. When there is a real risk that a jury will convict without agreement on a discrete set of actions, courts have required specific unanimity instructions. See, e.g., United States v. Holley, 942 F.2d 916, 928-29 (5th Cir.1991) (reversing a conviction for perjury because the district court's instructions allowed the jury to convict without agreement as to a particular false statement), cert. denied, --- U.S. ----, 114 S.Ct. 77, 126 L.Ed.2d 45 (1993). In our view, substantial agreement on a discrete set of actions is essential to ensure that the defendant is guilty beyond a reasonable doubt of some specific illegal conduct. See Howe, supra n. 10. 43 In the face of this tradition, we cannot read from Congress's silence that it intended CCE predicate offenses to constitute mere means of violating a single CCE offense. To do so would allow conviction on jury agreement merely that the defendant committed some three violations of United States Code, Title 21, Chapter 13, subchapters I and II, even when it is alleged that the defendant committed many different acts occurring at different times and places. This is a wholly different situation from the one at issue in Schad. Indeed, as Justice Scalia pointed out in criticizing the plurality's moral equivalence test of constitutionality, We would not permit, for example, an indictment charging that the defendant assaulted either X on Tuesday or Y on Wednesday, despite the 'moral equivalence' of those two acts. Schad, 501 U.S. at 651, 111 S.Ct. at 2507 (Scalia, J., concurring in the judgment). 12 44