Yeager v. United States
The Supreme Court ruled that a jury's inability to reach a verdict on some charges cannot be used to undercut what the jury actually decided when it acquitted the defendant on related charges in the same trial.
The decision means prosecutors cannot point to hung counts as evidence that an acquittal did not really settle a factual question, giving new force to the double-jeopardy protection for facts a jury has already found in a defendant's favor.
“A jury’s verdict of acquittal represents the community’s collective judgment regarding all the evidence and arguments presented to it.”
Explaining why an acquittal's factual findings remain binding regardless of unresolved counts.
How it got here: The trial court denied dismissal of the retried counts and the Fifth Circuit affirmed; the Supreme Court took the case to resolve a circuit split on the issue.
The Case in Depth
What happened
A former Enron Broadband executive was charged with fraud, insider trading, and money laundering after allegedly hyping a fiber-optic network to inflate Enron's stock price and then selling his own shares for millions in profit. After a 13-week trial, the jury acquitted him on the fraud charges but could not agree on the insider-trading and money-laundering charges, and the government sought to retry him on those counts.
The question before the Court
If a jury clears a defendant on fraud charges but can't agree on related insider-trading charges from the same trial, can the government retry him on those unresolved charges?
Why it matters
Defendants facing multi-count indictments gain a clearer shield: if a jury acquits on some counts, prosecutors cannot use the jury's failure to decide other counts as a reason to relitigate facts the acquittal already settled. This affects complex white-collar and multi-defendant prosecutions, including the Enron-era case at issue, and limits when the government gets a second run at the same factual dispute.
What changes now
The case goes back to the Fifth Circuit, which must now determine — without considering the hung counts — what the jury's acquittal actually decided and whether that finding blocks a retrial on the insider-trading and money-laundering charges. This is a final ruling on the legal question of whether hung counts matter, but the factual question of what the jury decided remains open for further proceedings.
What this does not decide
The Court did not decide whether the acquittal actually resolved the insider-trading issue in the defendant's favor — only that the earlier hung counts cannot be used to cloud that inquiry. Whether the retrial is barred depends on a fact-specific analysis of the trial record that the Court left for the lower court to complete.
Concurrences and dissents
Concurrence in part — Justice Kennedy
Justice Kennedy joined most of the majority opinion but not the part declining to require the Fifth Circuit to reexamine the record. He agreed with Justice Alito that there are real questions whether the acquittal actually rested on a finding that the defendant lacked inside information, since the jury could rationally have acquitted for the separate reason that he did not cause the misleading statements. He would have required, not merely permitted, the Court of Appeals to revisit that factual question on remand.
Dissent — Justice Scalia
“Jeopardy is commenced and terminated charge by charge, not issue by issue.”Scalia's core objection that the majority wrongly applies double jeopardy protection issue-by-issue rather than charge-by-charge.
Justice Scalia argued the majority's rule cannot be squared with the original meaning of the Double Jeopardy Clause or with the Court's continuing-jeopardy doctrine, under which a retrial after a hung jury is part of the same proceeding, not a second prosecution. He contended that if inconsistent verdicts within one trial can stand together, there is no principled reason an acquittal should block a contradictory conviction on counts the same jury simply failed to resolve. He would have affirmed and allowed the retrial.
Dissent — Justice Alito
Justice Alito joined Scalia's dissent but wrote separately to stress that, if the majority's rule stands, courts must apply Ashe's preclusion standard rigorously and presume juries acted rationally. He argued the record here suggests the jury may well have acquitted on the fraud counts for an independent reason — that the defendant did not personally cause the misleading statements — rather than because it found he lacked inside information, so the retrial might not actually be barred.
How the Court got there
The legal reasoning, step by step
- The Court applied issue preclusion, the double-jeopardy rule from Ashe v. Swenson barring the government from relitigating a factual issue a jury already necessarily decided in the defendant's favor by acquittal.
- Under that rule, courts look at the trial record — the charges, evidence, and instructions — to figure out whether a rational jury could only have acquitted by finding a particular fact in the defendant's favor.
- The Court held that a jury's failure to reach a verdict on other counts is not part of that record because a jury 'speaks' only through the verdicts it actually returns, not through counts it never resolved.
- Reasoning that a hung count could reflect any number of causes — disagreement, confusion, or exhaustion — the Court concluded that trying to read meaning into a hung count would be pure guesswork rather than legal analysis.
- The Court also distinguished this case from its rule in Powell and Dunn that logically inconsistent verdicts are not disturbed on appeal, explaining that a hung count is not a verdict at all and therefore cannot be used to second-guess an acquittal the way one verdict might undercut another.
- Because the jury's failure to decide the insider-trading counts had no bearing on what its acquittal on the fraud counts actually resolved, the Court concluded that the acquittal's preclusive effect must be assessed on its own terms.
Doctrinal impact
Cases affected by this decision
Reaffirms Ashe v. Swenson (397 U. S. 436)
The Court leaned on Ashe's rule barring relitigation of facts a jury already decided by acquittal.
Distinguishes Richardson v. United States (468 U. S. 317)
The Court said Richardson only held a mistrial doesn't end jeopardy, not that hung counts can undercut an acquittal.
Distinguishes United States v. Powell (469 U. S. 57)
The Court said Powell's rule protecting inconsistent verdicts doesn't apply because a hung count isn't a verdict.
Reaffirms Dunn v. United States (284 U. S. 390)
The Court relied on Dunn's rule that inconsistent verdicts aren't second-guessed to support its ruling here.