Opinion ID: 712236
Heading Depth: 3
Heading Rank: 3

Heading: The Forfeiture Proceeding as a Second Jeopardy

Text: 85 The government first contends that the forfeiture proceeding was not a second jeopardy. It bases its position on United States v. Millan, 2 F.3d 17 (2d Cir.1993), cert. denied, --- U.S. ----, 114 S.Ct. 922, 127 L.Ed.2d 215 (1994). In that case the Second Circuit held that double jeopardy did not bar a criminal proceeding following a § 881 forfeiture where both were part of a single, coordinated prosecution. Id. at 20. The court noted that although the civil and criminal actions were filed separately, they bore various indicia of simultaneity and coordination, and concluded that the two proceedings constituted a single prosecution that did not implicate constitutional concerns about prosecutorial abuse. 15 Id. The same analysis has been adopted in the Eleventh Circuit, see United States v. 18755 N. Bay Rd., 13 F.3d 1493, 1499 (11th Cir.1994), but was rejected in the Ninth Circuit, $405,089.23 United States Currency, 33 F.3d at 1216. We reject Millan as well. 86 We note initially that the authority for Millan 's distinction between proceeding and prosecution consists entirely of one sentence from Ohio v. Johnson, 467 U.S. 493, 104 S.Ct. 2536, 81 L.Ed.2d 425 (1984): [T]he [Double Jeopardy] Clause does not prohibit the State from prosecuting respondent for such multiple offenses in a single prosecution. Id. at 500, 104 S.Ct. at 2541, quoted in Millan, 2 F.3d at 20. But Johnson did not involve multiple proceedings; the question was instead whether a single proceeding could be subdivided like amoebae into more than one jeopardy for Fifth Amendment purposes. Id. at 501, 104 S.Ct. at 2542. The Johnson Court had no reason to consider, and gave no evidence that it did consider, the definition of prosecution in the context of multiple proceedings. Thus, Johnson is a very thin reed on which to perch the proposition that a single prosecution may comprise multiple proceedings without violating double jeopardy. 87 Moreover, Millan and progeny are also implicitly inconsistent with the approach taken in Halper and Kurth Ranch. In both cases the civil proceedings that followed the criminal convictions were arguably part of a single, coordinated prosecution, yet neither case took the view that two proceedings could constitute one prosecution. Moreover, the Court's choice of terminology in those cases is inconsistent with such a view. In Halper, the Court used the term prosecution synonymously with proceeding. See, e.g., Halper, 490 U.S. at 448-49, 109 S.Ct. at 1901-02 ([U]nder the Double Jeopardy Clause a defendant who already has been punished in a criminal prosecution may not be subjected to an additional civil sanction....) (emphasis added). Similarly, in Kurth Ranch the Court stated that the raid on the Kurth Ranch gave rise to four separate legal proceedings, including the criminal trial and the tax proceeding, Kurth Ranch, --- U.S. at ----, 114 S.Ct. at 1942, and then concluded that the tax proceeding was the functional equivalent of a successive criminal prosecution, id. at ----, 114 S.Ct. at 1948 (emphasis added). 88 The practical result, as Judge Easterbrook noted, is that two trials mean two jeopardies. In Kurth Ranch itself the tax proceeding was begun at the same time as the criminal prosecution; the Supreme Court did not think the fact that the two were pending contemporaneously mattered. Torres, 28 F.3d at 1465. 89 Finally, Millan also underestimates the policy concerns that underlie the Double Jeopardy Clause. The Double Jeopardy Clause protects defendants against more than a prosecutor's dissatisfaction with the results of the first trial. The clause is implicated whenever a defendant is obliged to marshal the resources and energies necessary for his defense more than once for the same alleged criminal acts. Abbate, 359 U.S. at 198-99, 79 S.Ct. at 673. The practice of instituting multiple proceedings against a single defendant, which the government benignly terms a coordinated law-enforcement effort, has as much or more capacity to harass and exhaust the defendant than does a post hoc decision to retry him. See $405,089.23 United States Currency, 33 F.3d at 1217 (We believe that such a coordinated, manipulative prosecution strategy heightens, rather than diminishes, the concern that the government is forcing an individual to 'run the gantlet' more than once. (quoting Green v. United States, 355 U.S. 184, 190, 78 S.Ct. 221, 225, 2 L.Ed.2d 199 (1957))); see also United States v. P.H.E., Inc., 965 F.2d 848, 850-51 (10th Cir.1992) (illustrating how coordinated prosecutions may become a form of prosecutorial abuse). 90 In the present case there is certainly no indication that the government's prosecution was impelled by improper motives. The government points out that it was procedurally constrained to institute two actions in order to do everything to Mr. May that the statutes appear to allow, and it is certainly true that attempts to punish both civilly and criminally must, in our legal system, give rise to separate proceedings. Nonetheless, the government's good faith does not make two proceedings a single jeopardy. 91 As the Ninth Circuit has observed, Millan contradicts controlling Supreme Court precedent as well as common sense. $405,089.23 United States Currency, 33 F.3d at 1216. We conclude that the government's single-prosecution argument is justified by neither policy nor precedent, and that [t]wo trials, even if close in time, are still double jeopardy. Torres, 28 F.3d at 1465. 92