Justices Side With Ex-Enron Exec on Retrial Issue
In a 6-3 ruling this morning, the U.S. Supreme Court closed the door, but didn’t slam it shut in the case involving a former Enron executive who is fighting government efforts to retry him.
The high court’s ruling throws out a portion of a New Orleans-based 5th U.S. Court of Appeals ruling that would have allowed a retrial of F. Scott Yeager, according to SCOTUSblog and the Associated Press.
Yeager, who was tried in 2005 on 125 counts, was acquitted on five of those counts. But jurors deadlocked on the others. While prosecutors frequently retry defendants when juries fail to reach a verdict, the issue here is whether the same essential facts are alleged in both the counts for which he was acquitted and the ones jurors couldn’t resolve.
The court ruled that if the charges all rely on the same basic facts, the defendant’s acquittal on some charges “protects him from prosecution for any charge for which that is an essential element.”
Separately, Yeager was reindicted on 13 counts of insider trading and money laundering, the AP notes.
