Opinion ID: 1288055
Heading Depth: 1
Heading Rank: 6

Heading: The Blockburger Test

Text: [1-4] In both the multiple punishment and successive prosecution contexts, the Supreme Court has ruled double jeopardy applies if the two offenses for which the defendant is punished or tried cannot survive the same elements test. United States v. Dixon, 509 U.S. 688, 125 L.Ed.2d 556, 568, 113 S.Ct. 2849 (1993). The same elements test, commonly referred to as the Blockburger test, examines whether each offense contains an element not contained in the other. The applicable rule is that where the same act or transaction constitutes a violation of two distinct statutory provisions, the test to be applied to determine whether there are two offenses or only one, is whether each provision requires proof of a fact which the other does not. (Italics ours.) Blockburger v. United States, 284 U.S. 299, 304, 76 L.Ed. 306, 52 S.Ct. 180 (1932); Dixon, 125 L.Ed.2d at 568. The Blockburger test was the standard for federal double jeopardy analysis for almost 60 years, until the Supreme Court decided Grady v. Corbin, 495 U.S. 508, 109 L.Ed.2d 548, 110 S.Ct. 2084 (1990). In Grady, the Supreme Court ruled a subsequent prosecution must satisfy a two-part test that included the Blockburger test and a same conduct test to avoid double jeopardy. The Grady Court outlined the second part of the same conduct test when it wrote: [T]he Double Jeopardy Clause bars any subsequent prosecution in which the government, to establish an essential element of an offense charged in that prosecution, will prove conduct that constitutes an offense for which the defendant has already been prosecuted. (Italics ours.) Grady, 495 U.S. at 521. The same conduct test announced in Grady was overruled three years later in Dixon. We have concluded, however, that Grady must be overruled. Unlike Blockburger analysis, whose definition of what prevents two crimes from being the same offence, US Const, Amdt 5, has deep historical roots and has been accepted in numerous precedents of this Court, Grady lacks constitutional roots. The same-conduct rule it announced is wholly inconsistent with earlier Supreme Court precedent and with the clear common-law understanding of double jeopardy. Dixon, 125 L.Ed.2d at 573. The Blockburger test is now the exclusive standard for reviewing whether successive prosecutions violate the double jeopardy clause of the Fifth Amendment.