Court Opinion

ID: 9711575
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-26 04:34:48.332457+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T18:23:06.041040
License: Public Domain

ROBERTS, Justice,
concurring, with whom GODFREY, Justice, joins.
I join with the majority of the Court for three reasons, the last of which prompts me to write separately.
My first reason is that there is no variance between the indictment and the proof. Wing was charged with entry into a structure owned by Robert O’Connor. The additional allegation, “namely a place of business known as O’Connor’s Pizza,” did not necessarily narrow the scope of the indictment to only the principal structure used in that business. I reject the suggestion of Justice Carter that the indictment must contain a sufficient description to eliminate all other structures. Such a suggestion belies the promise of simplification inherent in the Supreme Judicial Court’s adoption of M.R.Crim.P. 7(c). See H. Glassman, Maine Practice, Rules of Criminal Procedure § 7.3 (1967).1
My second reason, and a point ultimately conceded by Justice Carter in his dissent, is that the record is devoid of any suggestion that the defendant was in any way surprised by the manner of proof or prejudiced in the preparation of his defense.
My third reason is that I find the indictment alone entirely adequate as of the moment jeopardy attached to protect the defendant from subsequent prosecution for an entry into either structure. In my view, the liberalization of pleading requirements under M.R.Crim.P. 7(c) also expands the scope of the constitutional protection against double jeopardy. These concepts are but two sides of the same coin — their parameters are identical. When we say as a matter of law that a description is sufficient to support a conviction for entry into either of two structures, then that description is also sufficient to prevent subsequent prosecution relative to either structure. Whenever the prosecution chooses to rely upon liberal pleading requirements then the prosecution must expect the scope of double jeopardy protection to be expanded. Even if Wing had been acquitted by a jury on the basis of instructions erroneously requiring proof of entry into the main restaurant building of O’Connor’s Pizza, he could not again have been prosecuted for entry into the shed.

. According to H. Glassman, supra at § 7.11, the Supreme Judicial Court
has recognized, to paraphrase Justice Holmes, that the Declaration of Rights, giving the defendant the right to demand the nature and cause of the accusation against him, does not fasten forever upon the State of Maine “the inability of the seventeenth century common law to understand or accept a pleading that did not exclude every misinterpretation capable of occurring to intelligence fired with a desire to pervert.”
(quoting Paraiso v. United States, 207 U.S. 368, 372, 28 S.Ct. 127, 129, 52 L.Ed. 249 (1907)).