Whether a defendant may be convicted of conspiracy to commit first-degree murder when all charged alleged coconspirators were acquitted of conspiracy in earlier, separate trials.
Holding
Yes. The rule of consistency does not apply when alleged coconspirators are tried in separate proceedings.
Reasoning
The traditional rule of consistency provides that when every alleged coconspirator except one is acquitted, the remaining defendant ordinarily cannot be convicted of conspiracy. The rule rests on the bilateral nature of conspiracy: an agreement requires at least two guilty minds. In a joint trial, a single jury's simultaneous conviction of one alleged conspirator and acquittal of all others may appear logically irreconcilable because the same factfinder has both found, and denied, the existence of the same agreement.
That rationale developed when alleged conspirators were routinely tried together, on substantially identical evidence, before the same jury. In that setting, the rule checks two related risks: that the jury will disregard conspiracy's requirement of a genuine agreement and that it will treat the same evidence inconsistently as to participants in the alleged agreement.
Those safeguards do not carry over to separate trials. Different juries may hear different evidence, receive evidence in different forms, encounter witnesses who are available in one case but not another, or assess the same proof differently. Evidence admissible against one defendant may also be inadmissible against another. Thus, an acquittal in an earlier trial does not establish that no conspiracy existed; it can result from many factors unrelated to the actual existence of an agreement.
Separate jury verdicts may also differ because juries reasonably draw different inferences, or because an acquittal reflects compassion, prejudice, or an unreviewable exercise of lenity. The prosecution generally cannot overturn an acquittal as irrational or unsupported. Extending that possible error to another defendant would compound, rather than correct, a potential miscarriage of justice.
Because separate verdicts are not inherently inconsistent and applying the rule would neither ensure a correct understanding of conspiracy nor ensure consistent factfinding, the policies behind the rule are not served. The court therefore adopted the majority rule that prior acquittals of alleged coconspirators in separate proceedings do not bar Marquiz's conspiracy conviction. The court did not decide whether Colorado's statute adopts a unilateral theory of conspiracy or whether an unindicted girlfriend was also a coconspirator, because neither question was necessary to resolve the case.