Opinion ID: 587744
Heading Depth: 1
Heading Rank: 5

Heading: Flight Instruction--Defendant Slater

Text: 48 Mr. Slater contends the court's instructing the jury on his flight violates the prohibition against double jeopardy. 4 In the first trial, he reminds, the jury acquitted him of assault on a DEA agent on facts arising out of the identical activity which the instruction permitted the jury to consider in judging his guilt in this trial. Because the former acquittal was based on a general verdict, Mr. Slater urges the doctrine of collateral estoppel requires our examination of the prior record to assure the evidence was not constitutionally foreclosed. Moreover, Mr. Slater contends the flight instruction, in fact, transformed those events into evidence of his guilt. 49 Mr. Slater's contention is misdirected. The issue decided by the first jury's general verdict was that Mr. Slater did not assault a DEA special agent. Even though the circumstances in which the charge arose were the predicate for the instruction in this case, the assault charge and the instruction are otherwise unrelated. Indeed, resolution of the assault charge implicates none of the inferences the instruction permitted the jury to draw in this trial. More importantly, this trial was not a successive prosecution of that conduct which was the basis of the first charge, Grady v. Corbin, 495 U.S. 508, 110 S.Ct. 2084, 109 L.Ed.2d 548 (1990), nor did Instruction 25 require a resolution of that conduct. 50 Instead, the instruction was properly grounded on the factual predicate of Mr. Slater's behavior when DEA agents attempted to stop and arrest him. The instruction guided the jurors in their evaluation of the possible inferences that arose from those events particularly because that evidence was so fervidly contested. It correctly articulated the law of this circuit, Kreuter v. United States, 376 F.2d 654, 657 n. 2 (10th Cir.1967), cert. denied, 390 U.S. 1015, 88 S.Ct. 1267, 20 L.Ed.2d 165 (1968), and was appropriately particularized to fit the facts of the case. Consequently, the district court did not err in so instructing the jury.