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Negron v. State1/17/2001
ould allow the prosecutor to delay indicting the defendant on a related charge until the evidence is sufficiently developed to warrant taking the case to trial. There is no comparable way under the Model Penal Code that the prosecutor can argue, after one trial has been held, that another trial should be permitted on a related offense of which [the prosecutor] was aware in advance of the first trial. Williams II, 730 P.2d at 809.
Thus, Williams II rejects a rule that would uniformly bar a second trial of related charges after a first trial has been held. In Negron's case, this reasoning applies even more strongly because Negron pleaded no contest to the driving charges and, thus, there will be only one trial.
Finally, I note that Negron's negotiated plea to the driving charges makes it impossible to assess whether his case actually raised the legal problem he complains of. In order to bring his case within the "essentially the same evidence" rule adopted by the supreme court in Williams II, Negron argues that the driving charges and the cocaine charge should be viewed as resting on the same evidence because the State would have tried to use evidence of Negron's cocaine possession as circumstantial evidence that Negron's intoxication was due at least in part to his consumption of cocaine. But this claim must remain largely speculative because there was no trial of the driving charges; Negron and the State negotiated a plea agreement that disposed of those charges without a trial.
In this respect, Negron's case presents a legal problem similar to the ones presented in State v. Wickham and Sam v. State .
In both Wickham and Sam, defendants asserted on appeal that their trial judges made erroneous rulings concerning the evidence that the State would be allowed to present if the defendants pursued a particular litigation strategy: in Wickham, the defendant's decision to take the stand, and in Sam, the defendant's decision to raise a diminished capacity defense. But in both cases, the defendants ultimately chose not to pursue these strategies. Thus, the State never presented the challenged evidence, and the effect of the trial judges' rulings remained speculative. Both the supreme court and this court concluded that it was impossible to judge the effect of the asserted error "in a purely hypothetical or abstract context" , and thus we rejected the defendant's claims.
Negron's case presents an analogous situation. Negron argues that, had he chosen to go to trial on the driving offenses, the State would have sought to use evidence of his cocaine possession to try to prove the DWI charge. But Negron chose not to go to trial. One is therefore left to speculate as to whether the State would have pursued the litigation strategy that Negron suggests and, if so, whether the State's proof of Negron's intoxication would have rested so heavily on evidence of his cocaine possession that it would be fair to say that the DWI charge and the later cocaine charge were based on "essentially the same evidence". Under these circumstances, any attempt to resolve Negron's double jeopardy claim "would amount to pure speculation".
For all of these reasons, I conclude that Negron's decision to resolve the driving charges through a negotiated plea precludes him from now claiming that the later cocaine charge violated the double jeopardy clause of the Alaska Constitution.
Id.
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