State v. Cain

• Decision Date: 22 December 1975
• Docket Number: No. 57106,57106
• Citation: 324 So.2d 830
• Parties: STATE of Louisiana v. Clyde CAIN.
• Court: Louisiana Supreme Court

Page 830

324 So.2d 830

STATE of Louisiana v. Clyde CAIN.

No. 57106.

Supreme Court of Louisiana.

Dec. 22, 1975.

William J. Guste, Jr., Atty. Gen., Barbara Rutledge, Asst. Atty. Gen., Harry F. Connick, Dist. Atty., Louise Korns, Ralph Whalen, Asst. Dist. Attys., for plaintiff-appellant.

John Unsworth, New Orleans, Mary Olive Pierson, McKernan, Beychok, Cooper, Screen & Pierson, Baton Rouge, for defendant-appellee.

SUMMERS, Justice.

Donald Ruiz and William Moore were murdered on November 21, 1973. The Orleans Parish grand jury returned an indictment charging Clyde Cain and William Burman with the first degree murder of both Ruiz and Moore.

Although indicted for both murders, Cain and Burman were tried on October 23, 1974 solely for the murder of Ruiz. The jury returned a general verdict of not guilty, acquitting the defendants of the murder of Ruiz.

Subsequently, on October 25, 1974, the District Attorney for the Parish of Orleans moved to dismiss or Nolle prosequi the indictment charging the defendants with the murder of Moore. The motion was granted by the trial judge. The matter was again presented to the grand jury and Cain was indicted on October 21, 1975 for the murder of Moore. (Burman is dead).

Defendant Cain, through counsel, then filed a motion to quash the indictment alleging that he had been tried and acquitted of the murder of Ruiz on October 24, 1974. Testimony in that trial, he asserted, was to the effect that both Ruiz and Moore were shot to death at the same time on November 21, 1973, at approximately 4:30 p.m. Therefore, the motion continues, the only controverted issue at the trial was the identity of the alleged murderers, and, it is implied, the verdict of not guilty necessarily rejected the sufficiency and credibility of the State's evidence on that issue. In fact, the jury's verdict read, 'not guilty due to insufficient evidence.'

So, defendant contends, the doctrine of collateral estoppel prevents the retrial of that question, for the indictment upon which such a trial would be based would bring about a violation of that doctrine. The result would be to subject Cain to double jeopardy contrary to the protection guaranteed by the Fifth Amendment of the United States Constitution.

At the hearing on the motion, the State's attorney conceded the correctness of the allegations of the motion to quash. All parties agreed that the State's main witness testified that he saw two persons enter the house where Ruiz and Moore were murdered, and a short time later both defendants left the house. The next morning the maid found the bodies of Ruiz and Moore in the house.

The trial judge granted the motion to quash, and the State has appealed.

The Fifth Amendment to the Federal Constitution declares: 'nor shall any person be subject for the same offence to be twice put in jeopardy of life or limb.' ¹ The concept of double jeopardy embodied in the clause is designed, not only to prohibit doubt jeopardy, not to prevent double punishment as well, forbidding that an accused be penalized more severely than the law provides, through the device of finding that he has committed several violations of substantive law where only one exists.

On the other hand, the restriction on multiple prosecutions is designed to implement several procedural objectives. One of these is to protect the defendant and the public from the expense of prolonged and unnecessary litigation resulting from retrial of cases already adjudicated. Another is to prevent the use of several proceedings to try questions of law and fact which logically make up but one case. Still another objective is to safeguard the accused from excessive harassment and the stigma of repeated criminal prosecutions; he should not be made to 'run the gauntlet' again.

Louisiana, like the United States Supreme Court and most American jurisdictions, has expanded the determination of 'same offense' in the jeopardy clause into a 'same evidence' test. Blockburger v. United States, 284 U.S. 299, 52 S.Ct. 180, 76 L.Ed. 306 (1932); State v. Roberts, 152 La. 283, 93 So. 95 (1922). Briefly, so far as relevant here, 'the test to be applied to determine whether there are two offenses or only one is whether each provision (i.e., each charge) requires proof of an additional fact which the other does not.' Blockburger v. United States, supra at 304, 52 S.Ct. at 182.

The Fifth Amendment guarantee against double jeopardy, as understood and interpreted by the United States Supreme Court, has been held to be enforceable against the States through the Fourteenth Amendment. Benton v. Maryland, 395 U.S. 784, 89 S.Ct. 2056, 23 L.Ed.2d 707 (1969). This case, therefore, is to be decided upon principles established by the decisions of the United States Supreme Court.

In 1916 Mr. Justice Holmes delivered the opinion of the Court in United States v. Oppenheimer, 242 U.S. 85, 37 S.Ct. 68, 61 L.Ed. 161, and announced for the first time that the doctrine of collateral estoppel then in use in civil litigation was applicable to federal criminal prosecutions. It was his opinion that the doctrine represented a fundamental principle of justice in the civil law which was not done away with by the Fifth Amendment.

Although collateral estoppel then became an integral part of federal criminal law, it was not elevated to the dimension of a federal constitutional right binding upon the States until 1970 by the decision in Ashe v. Swenson, 397 U.S. 436, 90 S.Ct. 1189, 25 L.Ed.2d 469. There 'collateral estoppel' was said to be an

'. . . awkward phrase, but it stands for an extremely important principle in our adversary system of justice. It means simply that when an issue of ultimate fact has once been determined by a valid and final judgment, that issue cannot again be litigated between the same parties.'

In Ashe v. Swenson six men engaged in a poker game were robbed by three or four masked gunmen. Six weeks after having been acquitted in a state trial for the robbery of one of the players, defendant was tried for the robbery of another and convicted. The witnesses in the two trials were for the most part the same and the State's evidence establishing the facts of the robbery was uncontradicted, but the testimony identifying the defendant as one of the robbers was substantially stronger at the second trial.

The question decided there was whether, after a jury determined by its...