United States Supreme Court Cases & Opinions

U.S. Supreme Court

GREEN v. OHIO , 455 U.S. 976 (1982)

February 22, 1982

On petition for writ of certiorari to the Court of Appeals of Ohio, Butler County.

The petition for a writ of certiorari is denied.

Justice WHITE, with whom Justice BLACKMUN and Justice POWELL, join, dissenting.

Because there is no jurisdictional bar to considering this case, and because the decision below fails to give due regard to our cases, I dissent from the denial of certiorari.

I

Petitioner, an attorney, was indicted in 1978 on two counts of grand theft. The first count charged him with obtaining or exerting control over a bank account by deception in that he led the executrix of an estate to believe that the account was a probate asset of the estate rather than a survivorship account. The second count of the indictment charged petitioner with obtaining or exerting control over the account be-

Page 455 U.S. 976 , 977

yond the scope of the owner's consent by writing $9,000 in checks payable to himself on the account. The trial court sustained petitioner's pretrial motion to dismiss the first count of the indictment on the ground that it failed to state an offense under the Ohio statute. He was acquitted following a bench trial on the second count, the trial judge finding that the State had "failed to establish all of [the] elements" of the crime charged in the second count. App. to Pet. for Cert. 13a. The State appealed the pretrial dismissal of the first count and on January 30, 1980, the Court of Appeals for the First Appellate District of Ohio reversed the dismissal of the first count and remanded to the trial court for further proceedings. Petitioner then filed a motion to dismiss on the ground that a trial on the first count would violate the Double Jeopardy Clause of the Fifth Amendment, made applicable to the States by the Fourteenth Amendment. Citing Ashe v. Swenson, 397 U.S. 436 (1970), petitioner argued that the principle of collateral estoppel is part of the Fifth Amendment guarantee against double jeopardies and that his acquittal on the second count prevented the State from again attempting to prove one or more of the elements of the crime charged in the first count. The trial court denied the motion and petitioner appealed.

The Court of Appeals for the Twelfth Appellate District of Ohio affirmed the denial of the motion. Relying principally on Blockburger v. United States, 284 U.S. 299 (1932), the court said that the test for determining whether the trial on the second count bars a subsequent trial on the first count is whether each count requires proof of an additional fact which the other does not. The court observed that in order to obtain a conviction on the second count, the State was required to prove that petitioner knowingly obtained or exerted control over the property of another, with purpose to deprive the owner of that property, and that he acted beyond the scope of the owner's express or implied consent. To success- [455 U.S. 976 , 978]

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