Court Opinion

ID: 9431529
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-02 23:32:30.329523+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:23:28.851969
License: Public Domain

*580Justice Stevens,
concurring.
While I join the Court’s opinion, I write separately to identify the doubtful character of the basic premise on which respondents’ double jeopardy claim rests. Respondents assume that their price-fixing activities in April 1978 and July 1979 were not separate crimes because they were carried out pursuant to an overarching conspiracy that had been in existence for more than 25 years.
“A conspiracy is a partnership in criminal purposes.” United States v. Kissel, 218 U. S. 601, 608 (1910). It “does not become several conspiracies because it continues over a period of time” or because it is an “agreement to commit several offenses.” Braverman v. United States, 317 U. S. 49, 52 (1942). Thus, the continuous, cooperative effort among Kansas highway contractors to rig bids, which permeated the Kansas highway construction industry for more than 25 years, see ante, at 567, was unquestionably a single, continuing conspiracy that violated § 1 of the Sherman Act, 15 U. S. C. § 1. It does not necessarily follow, however, that separate bid-rigging arrangements carried out in furtherance of an illegal master plan may not be prosecuted separately.
All of the elements of a Sherman Act violation were alleged in the indictment charging respondents with price fixing on the Kansas highway project bid on April 25, 1978. App. 143a-151a. The same is true with respect to the indictment relating to the second project, bid more than a year later and to be performed in a different county. Id., at 136a-142a. Each indictment alleged a separate crime. I am not at all sure that the fact that both may have been committed pursuant to still another continuing violation of the Sherman Act should bar separate prosecutions for each of those violations.
There is something perverse in the assumption that respondents’ constitutional rights may have been violated by separately prosecuting them for each of two complete and flagrant violations of the Sherman Act simply because they may also have been guilty of an ongoing and even more serious vi*581olation of the same statute for more than a quarter of a century. Whether the law requires that all of these violations be merged into one is a question that need not be decided in this case. Yet I believe there is value in making it clear that the Court has not decided that question today.