People v. State

In praise of Jeff Gamso for this excellent post — even though Jeff doesn’t think I’m a real criminal defense lawyer (“RCDL”) and on rare occasions indulges in drivel — and in praise of the Iowa Supreme Court for the excellent reasons cited in Jeff’s excellent post.

This is precisely the kind of post I meant when I recently wrote:

I admire but can’t hold a candle to those bloggers like Jeff Gamso and many others who regularly offer substantive, insightful and practical posts on the criminal law (i.e., the law criminal defense attorneys are actually constrained to deal with, rather than the Law I like to occupy myself with). Don’t get me wrong. Some of the happiest times in my life have been when I’ve had the opportunity to sink my teeth into an actual legal controversy involving statutes and case law and such, and IMHO I think I’m pretty good at it. I have posted a few things of a more practical nature, such as here, here, here, here, here, here, and here. But it generally takes an actual client with an actual problem (or a law review deadline) to get those juices flowing for me, and I’ve taken the consensus of the practical blawgosphere to heart and tried to be circumspect about writing about my own cases, at least until after they’re over. I imagine that what those other bloggers have that I don’t is a lifetime of experience in the criminal law, giving them a broader context in which statutes and case law and such are intrinsically interesting even when they don’t touch on a current client’s problems. They don’t have to do a lot of research to write a post about where a new case fits in the context because they already have a pretty good idea. Maybe someday I’ll get to that level. In the meantime, I learn from and appreciate them.

Turns out that in this instance the subject of Jeff’s post and of the particular Iowa Supreme Court decision he highlights and praises — namely, the question of the validity of an “inconsistent verdict” — is something I know something about, because it’s related to a doctrine of great importance to a former client who is innocent and whose saga and jeopardy continues on direct appeal — namely, the doctrine of “collateral estoppel,” or “issue-preclusion.” Depending on the ultimate outcome of that appellate process for my innocent former client, you might hear a lot from me on the subject of issue-preclusion, or you might not hear from me at all for some time.

Unfortunately, when it comes to the validity of inconsistent verdicts our own Indiana Supreme Court in Beattie has recently joined the U.S. Supreme Court and most other state supreme courts in playing what the Iowa Supreme Court calls “legal horseshoes.” Fortunately, the U.S. Supreme Court in Yeager has recently made clear that what the Iowa Supreme Court calls this “shrug of the judicial shoulders” in response to inconsistent verdicts does not affect the applicability of issue-preclusion:

In Dunn v. United States, 284 U.S. 390, 393, 52 S.Ct. 189, 76 L.Ed. 356 (1932), the Court, speaking through Justice Holmes, held that a logical inconsistency between a guilty verdict and a verdict of acquittal does not impugn the validity of either verdict. The question presented in this case is whether an apparent inconsistency between a jury’s verdict of acquittal on some counts and its failure to return a verdict on other counts affects the preclusive force of the acquittals under the Double Jeopardy Clause of the Fifth Amendment. We hold that it does not.

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