holding that, although petitioner was convicted of conspiracy despite the government’s failure to present any evidence linking the petitioner to one of the two illegal objects of the conspiracy as stated in the indictment, this did not require reversal of the jury’s verdict as there was evidentiary support for the other object. Although reversal is appropriate where a jury's verdict may have rested on a legally inadequate basis, such is not the case when one possible basis of conviction was unsupported by sufficient evidence, as juries are perfectly well equipped to evaluate the evidence
How later courts described this case
- holding that, although petitioner was convicted of conspiracy despite the government’s failure to present any evidence linking the petitioner to one of the two illegal objects of the conspiracy as stated in the indictment, this did not require reversal of the jury’s verdict as there was evidentiary support for the other object. Although reversal is appropriate where a jury's verdict may have rested on a legally inadequate basis, such is not the case when one possible basis of conviction was unsupported by sufficient evidence, as juries are perfectly well equipped to evaluate the evidence
- holding that a general jury verdict is valid so long as the verdict is legally supportable on one of the submitted grounds, even though there is no assurance that a valid ground, rather than an invalid one, was actually the basis for the jury’s decision; but distinguishing general verdicts that include charges that are legally invalid for either constitutional or statutory reasons and therefore must be overturned, from general verdicts that include charges which are factually unsupported
- holding that the rule “that a general jury verdict was valid so long it was legally supportable on one of the submitted grounds ... [is] also applied to the analogous situation at issue here: a general jury verdict under a single count charging the commission of an offense by two or more means”
- explaining the pre-Revolutionary common law principle that “a … verdict was valid so long as it was legally supportable on one of the submitted grounds—even though that gave no assurance that a valid ground, rather than an invalid one, was actually the basis for the jury’s action”
Written by the judges who cited it.
Later courts went against this
Questioned by State v. Kulmac, 230 Conn. 43 (1994)
Recent case law, however, has cast doubt on the viability of this principle; see Griffin v. United States, 502 U.S. 46, 112 S. Ct. 466, 116 L. Ed. 2d 371 (1991); and in State v. Chapman, 229 Conn. 529, 643 A.2d 1213 (1994), we determined that any error in this regard is not constitutional in nature.
The opinion
Justice Blackmun,
concurring in the judgment.
I agree with the Court that petitioner has not made out a violation of the Due Process Clause, although I do not follow the Court on its self-guided tour of the common law. See ante, at 49-52. It is enough, I think, to observe that petitioner has not presented any sustained constitutional argument whatsoever.
I agree further with the Court’s conclusion that Yates v. United States, 354 U. S. 298 (1957), does not require reversal in this case, and that petitioner has not sufficiently distinguished Turner v. United States, 396 U. S. 398 (1970). See ante, at 56-59. I would emphasize more strongly than does the Court, however, the danger of jury confusion that was inherent in this multiple-defendant, 23-count indictment and the resulting 5- to 6-week trial.
*61 The Court rightly observes that “it would generally be preferable” for the trial court to remove unsupported theories from the jury’s consideration. See ante, at 60. I would also note that the Government had two other means of avoiding the possibility, however remote, that petitioner was convicted on a theory for which there was insufficient evidence: The Government either could have charged the two objectives in separate counts, or agreed to petitioner’s request for special interrogatories. The Court wisely rejects, albeit silently, the Government’s argument that these practices, but not the complex and voluminous proof, would likely have confused the jury. I would go further than the Court and commend these techniques to the Government for use in complex conspiracy prosecutions.