Opinion ID: 3151679
Heading Depth: 3
Heading Rank: 1

Heading: Collateral Estoppel and Ashe v. Swenson

Text: Collateral estoppel is “an integral part of the protection against double jeopardy guaranteed by the Fifth and Fourteenth Amendments.” Harris v. Washington, 404 U.S. 55, 56 (1971) (per curiam). Collateral estoppel “means simply that when an issue of ultimate fact has once been determined by a valid and final judgment, that issue cannot again be litigated between the same parties in any future lawsuit.” Ashe, 397 U.S. at 443; see Wilson v. Belleque, 554 F.3d 816, 830 (9th Cir. 2009) (“In a criminal case, collateral estoppel precludes the state from bringing a charge when a previous ‘jury resolve[d], in a manner adverse to the government, an issue that the government would be required to prove in order to obtain a . . . conviction at the second trial.’” (alterations in original) (quoting United States v. Castillo-Basa, 483 F.3d 890, 899 (9th Cir. 2007))). In determining whether an issue of ultimate fact has been decided in a prior proceeding, we examine, “in a practical frame,” the record and circumstances of the first proceeding. Ashe, 397 U.S. at 444 (citation omitted); see id. (“[T]he rule of collateral estoppel in criminal cases is not to be applied with the hypertechnical and archaic approach of a 19th century pleading book, but with realism and rationality.”). The Supreme Court “significantly expanded” the protection the Double Jeopardy Clause affords criminal defendants when, in Ashe v. Swenson, it imported into the Clause the doctrine of criminal collateral estoppel. Dowling v. United States, 493 U.S. 342, 356 (1990) (Brennan, J., dissenting); see id. (“[I]n addition to being protected against retrial for the ‘same offense,’ the defendant is protected WILKINSON V. GINGRICH 11 against prosecution for an offense that requires proof of a fact found in his favor in a prior proceeding.”). In Ashe, the defendant was accused of robbing six participants in a poker game. There was no doubt that a robbery occurred; the only dispute was whether the defendant was one of the robbers. 397 U.S. at 445. After the defendant was tried and acquitted for robbing one of the players, the state prosecuted him for robbing a different player. The state’s evidence of the robber’s identity was stronger in the second case, and the defendant was convicted. Id. at 439–40. The Supreme Court reversed the conviction, holding that if a defendant can show that an issue of fact essential for the proof of an offense for which the defendant is later prosecuted was necessarily decided in a prior proceeding, that determination will be binding upon the later prosecution. Id. at 445. An essential, or ultimate, issue of fact in Ashe was the identity of the robber. Because the state “had failed to prove beyond a reasonable doubt” that the defendant was one of the robbers, the state was barred by the doctrine of collateral estoppel from trying the defendant for the robbery of the other poker players, “since identity would be an ultimate issue in each such trial.” Santamaria v. Horsley, 133 F.3d 1242, 1245 (9th Cir. 1998) (en banc) (citing Ashe, 397 U.S. at 445). In this case, the State argues that collateral estoppel and the Double Jeopardy Clause did not bar the perjury prosecution because the traffic court judge did not necessarily decide the issue in the perjury trial—whether Wilkinson testified truthfully in traffic court. The state Court of Appeal was of the same view, concluding that Wilkinson’s veracity was the ultimate issue in the perjury trial, but that it could not know if the traffic court judge believed that Wilkinson was being honest when he denied being the driver. We hold that the Court of Appeal unreasonably applied Ashe v. Swenson in 12 WILKINSON V. GINGRICH concluding that collateral estoppel and the Double Jeopardy Clause did not apply. The Court of Appeal failed to recognize that the driver’s identity was necessarily at issue in both the traffic and perjury prosecutions. In one sense, the State is correct in contending that the two proceedings posed different questions. Narrowly construed, the question in the traffic court proceeding was whether Wilkinson was the driver of the speeding car, and the question in the perjury proceeding was whether Wilkinson gave false testimony in traffic court when he denied being that driver. But the State is incorrect in contending that this difference means that collateral estoppel and the Double Jeopardy Clause do not apply. A second prosecution is impermissible when “to have convicted the defendant in the second trial, the second jury had to have reached a directly contrary conclusion [to the factfinder in the first trial].” Dowling, 493 U.S. at 348 (majority opinion). Resolution of the issue in the first case (whether Wilkinson was the driver) and the issue in the second case (whether Wilkinson was telling the truth when he denied being the driver) both turned on the factfinders’ conclusions regarding the identity of the driver. The driver’s identity was plainly the ultimate issue in the traffic court proceeding. There was no dispute that the driver, whoever he was, was speeding. The only question was whether Wilkinson was the driver. The traffic court docket and the parties’ accounts of what transpired in traffic court confirm that this was the only contested issue in traffic court. The driver’s identity was also an ultimate issue in the perjury prosecution. The jury was instructed that it needed to find that Wilkinson knowingly made a false statement in order to convict him of perjury. The judge explained that the alleged false statement was that WILKINSON V. GINGRICH 13 Wilkinson “was not the driver of the vehicle on January 20th, 2007.” If Wilkinson was not the driver, then his statement that he was not the driver was not false, and he did not commit perjury. The traffic court judge in the first case “actually decided” the ultimate issue in the second case. See Dowling, 493 U.S. at 350. As Wilkinson contends, and as the district court agreed, the traffic court judge acquitted Wilkinson because he was not the driver of the car. In acquitting Wilkinson in the first case, the traffic court judge thus actually and necessarily decided that Wilkinson was not the driver, and that he had been telling the truth in so stating. Collateral estoppel and the Double Jeopardy clause apply. The State argues that we do not know on what basis the traffic court acquitted Wilkinson, offering three different reasons the traffic court judge might have had for acquitting Wilkinson: (1) he believed Wilkinson was telling the truth; (2) he did not believe the officer was telling the truth; and (3) he concluded that the State had not met its burden of proof. This argument fails to recognize that each of these reasons goes to whether Wilkinson was the driver. The traffic court judge (1) may have believed Wilkinson was telling the truth that he was not the driver, (2) he may have believed that the officer was not telling the truth that Wilkinson was the driver, or (3) he may have believed that the State had not sufficiently proven that Wilkinson was the driver. However the traffic court judge reached his conclusion that Wilkinson should be acquitted, the “single rationally conceivable” basis on which he could have done so was that Wilkinson was not the driver. Ashe, 397 U.S. at 445. 14 WILKINSON V. GINGRICH It does not matter that the traffic court judge might have concluded that Wilkinson was not the driver only because the State failed to carry its burden of proof. In both the traffic court proceeding and the perjury proceeding, the State’s burden of proof was beyond a reasonable doubt. A factfinder’s determination that the government failed to carry its burden on an issue in the first proceeding has preclusive effect in a subsequent proceeding raising that same issue, provided that both proceedings are governed by the same standard of proof. See Charles v. Hickman, 228 F.3d 981, 985–86 (9th Cir. 2000); cf. Evans v. Michigan, 133 S. Ct. 1069, 1075 (2013) (noting that an acquittal includes “a ruling by the court that the evidence is insufficient to convict” and a “factual finding [that] necessarily establish[es] the criminal defendant’s lack of criminal culpability” (alterations in original) (quoting United States v. Scott, 437 U.S. 82, 91, 98 (1978)). Ashe itself held that the first jury’s determination that “there was at least a reasonable doubt” as to an ultimate issue precluded relitigation of that issue in a subsequent prosecution. Ashe, 397 U.S. at 446. If we were to conclude otherwise, “it would not only fundamentally change our system of jurisprudence, but it would render every acquittal by a jury meaningless for purposes of double jeopardy: a jury can always be said to have concluded only that the prosecution failed to prove its case beyond a reasonable doubt.” Castillo-Basa, 483 F.3d at 902.