People v. Smith
| Decision Date | 09 November 1995 |
| Docket Number | No. 94CA0564,94CA0564 |
| Citation | 919 P.2d 843 |
| Parties | The PEOPLE of the State of Colorado, Plaintiff-Appellee, v. Edgar L. SMITH, Defendant-Appellant. . III |
| Court | Colorado Court of Appeals |
Gale A. Norton, Attorney General, Stephen K. ErkenBrack, Chief Deputy Attorney General, Timothy M. Tymkovich, Solicitor General, and Deborah Isenberg Pratt, Assistant Attorney General, Denver, for Plaintiff-Appellee.
John Turner, Colorado Springs, for Defendant-Appellant.
Opinion by Judge BRIGGS.
Defendant, Edgar L. Smith, appeals the judgment of conviction entered on a jury verdict finding him guilty of theft. He asserts, among other things, that his second trial on that charge was precluded under the doctrine of collateral estoppel because, even though the jury could not reach a verdict on the charge of theft in the first trial, it acquitted him on a related charge of burglary. We reverse.
A home was burglarized at night and items of value taken. Prior to the burglary, a neighbor had called police to report the suspicious activities of two men in a vehicle. When police arrived, a chase ensued and the vehicle crashed. The police used dogs to track defendant and arrested him near the scene of the crash. In the pockets of the jacket he was wearing were items taken from the victim's residence. The driver of the vehicle was later arrested.
Defendant was charged with burglary, theft, and theft by receiving, all related to the same victim. For reasons unclear on the record before us, the trial court dismissed the charge of theft by receiving.
At trial, defendant testified that he had innocently accompanied the driver of the vehicle to the neighborhood. Although once there he knew his companion was going to and did burglarize the house, defendant claimed he did not assent to or participate in the burglary or theft. He asserted that during the chase he grabbed the driver's jacket to protect himself and jumped out of the vehicle before it crashed. In contrast, the driver testified that defendant fully participated in the burglary and theft.
After the close of the evidence, the court instructed the jury as to the elements of the crimes of burglary and theft. The burglary charged was with the intent of committing theft. The jury was further instructed that defendant could be convicted of either offense as a principal or complicitor. Finally, the jury was instructed it could infer from the unexplained possession of recently stolen property that defendant was guilty of burglary and theft, if the jury determined such an inference was warranted from the evidence as a whole.
The jury found defendant not guilty of the charge of burglary but deadlocked on the charge of theft. The trial court therefore declared a mistrial on that charge.
Defendant then moved for dismissal of the theft charge. The trial court denied the motion.
At a second trial, the court rejected defendant's request that the jury be instructed on the elements of burglary and informed that defendant had been acquitted of the burglary. It also rejected a request that the jury be instructed on the elements of theft by receiving, so that the theft charged could be distinguished. Defendant was convicted of the theft and, because the jury also found him to be a habitual criminal, sentenced to life imprisonment.
The Fifth Amendment's guarantee against double jeopardy includes as an integral part the doctrine of collateral estoppel. People v. Allee, 740 P.2d 1 (Colo.1987). For a defendant in a criminal case to invoke collateral estoppel against the state, four requirements must be met: (1) the issue that the state desires to litigate must be identical to an issue that was actually and necessarily decided in the prior litigation; (2) there must have been a final judgment on the merits of the prior litigation; (3) the state must have been a party to the prior litigation; and (4) the defendant seeking to assert collateral estoppel must have been a party to the prior litigation. People v. Allee, supra. Thus, the doctrine precludes a later trial if a rational jury could not have grounded its earlier verdict upon an issue other than that upon which a later conviction would necessarily be based. See Ashe v. Swenson, 397 U.S. 436, 90 S.Ct. 1189, 25 L.Ed.2d 469 (1970); People v. Horvat, 186 Colo. 202, 527 P.2d 47 (1974).
Collateral estoppel is to be applied with "realism and rationality":
Where a previous judgment of acquittal was based upon a general verdict, as is usually the case, this approach requires a court to examine the record of a prior proceeding, taking into account the pleadings, evidence, charge, and other relevant matter.... The inquiry must be set in a practical frame and viewed with an eye to all of the circumstances.
Ashe v. Swenson, supra, 397 U.S. at 444, 90 S.Ct. at 1194, 25 L.Ed.2d at 475-76; see People v. Matheson, 671 P.2d 968 (Colo.App.1983).
The doctrine of collateral estoppel is derived from the doctrine of double jeopardy, but the two are not the same. For example, the protections of double jeopardy preclude successive prosecutions only if the elements of the two crimes are the same. The prosecution is therefore not required to pass a "same conduct" test. In contrast, "the collateral-estoppel effect attributed to the Double Jeopardy Clause ... may bar a later prosecution for a separate offense where the Government has lost an earlier prosecution involving the same facts." United States v. Dixon, 509 U.S. 688, ----, 113 S.Ct. 2849, 2860, 125 L.Ed.2d 556, 573 (1993) (emphasis in original).
The concept of collateral estoppel has been embodied by the General Assembly in §§ 18-1-302 and 18-1-303, C.R.S. . These statutes are designed to protect a defendant from having to relitigate an issue of ultimate fact once it has been determined by a valid and final judgment. Like § 18-1-303, the scope of § 18-1-302, and in particular § 18-1-302(1)(b), C.R.S. (1986 Repl.Vol. 8B), applicable here, is the same as the constitutional protections it embodies and involves the same analysis. See People v. Matheson, supra; see also Chatfield v. Colorado Court of Appeals, 775 P.2d 1168 (Colo.1989). Thus, we must determine whether a rational jury could ground a conviction for theft upon an issue other than one necessarily foreclosed by defendant's earlier acquittal on the charge of burglary.
The supreme court's analysis of collateral estoppel in the context of a complicity instruction in Turner v. Arkansas, 407 U.S. 366, 92 S.Ct. 2096, 32 L.Ed.2d 798 (1972) is instructive. There, the defendant was charged with murdering the victim during the course of a robbery. He was initially charged with only the murder because state law did not permit another count to be brought with a charge of murder. The jury found him not guilty of murder.
The prosecution in Turner sought to retry the defendant on the charge of robbery. The theory was that the jury might have believed the...
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People v. Smith
...The jury acquitted Smith of burglary and was unable to reach a verdict on the theft charge. We granted certiorari in People v. Smith, 919 P.2d 843 (Colo.App.1995), to consider whether the doctrine of collateral estoppel barred reprosecution of Smith for the crime of theft. Because we determ......