United States Court of Appeals for the Tenth Circuit · 2019-04-22
Case and law context
Role: applied; posture: Double-jeopardy appeal addressing whether separate drug agreements formed one conspiracy; result: claimant-won; claim:
Instances and excluded annotation blocks
| Case | Element | Holding and scope | Variant | Exact source quotations |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| /f3d/921/0951-01 — United States Court of Appeals for the Tenth Circuit · 2019 | Agreement of two or more persons to the unlawful object | not Excluded from merits counts applied / procedural basis: law; party: defendant Leal; theory: identity of successive conspiracies; subject: party=defendant Leal; theory=identity of successive conspiracies The court rejects the proposed inference that two prosecuted deals were the same conspiracy for double-jeopardy purposes. It does not find either prosecution lacks all agreement or that Leal acted only with an informant. | double-jeopardy/separate-deals-linked-by-informant | Here, there is no evidence that (1) Ms. Tapia or Mr. Carmona were "major buyers," (2) they obtained their drugs from the same supplier, or (3) Mr. Leal was a supplier to either of them.Source: docroot/ir/caselaw/f3d_921.jsonl#/f3d/921/0951-01; Unicode character offsets [19598:19783] (end exclusive); SHA-256 9548ccac58b96b23f4639dd698eb70e092ffa90878ae6553b9b59f22ede5657e.This hardly supports an inference that they pursued a shared common objective or that the Tapia deal "[was] necessary or advantageous to the success" of the conspirators in the Carmona deal.Source: docroot/ir/caselaw/f3d_921.jsonl#/f3d/921/0951-01; Unicode character offsets [19856:20046] (end exclusive); SHA-256 9548ccac58b96b23f4639dd698eb70e092ffa90878ae6553b9b59f22ede5657e. |
| /f3d/921/0951-01 — United States Court of Appeals for the Tenth Circuit · 2019 | Knowing and voluntary participation in the agreement | not_reached Excluded from merits counts applied / proceduralProcedural conspiracy-identity ruling; not a fresh merits sufficiency instance. | Unspecified variant | Although two or more people must agree to form a conspiracy, an informant cannot count toward that requirement: "[T]here can be no indictable conspiracy involving only the defendant and government agents or informers."Source: docroot/ir/caselaw/f3d_921.jsonl#/f3d/921/0951-01; Unicode character offsets [9860:10078] (end exclusive); SHA-256 9548ccac58b96b23f4639dd698eb70e092ffa90878ae6553b9b59f22ede5657e. |
Court interpretations recorded from this case
interpretation
Although two or more people must agree to form a conspiracy, an informant cannot count toward that requirement: "[T]here can be no indictable conspiracy involving only the defendant and government agents or informers."
/f3d/921/0951-01 — United States Court of Appeals for the Tenth Circuit · 2019
Although two or more people must agree to form a conspiracy, an informant cannot count toward that requirement: "[T]here can be no indictable conspiracy involving only the defendant and government agents or informers."Source:
docroot/ir/caselaw/f3d_921.jsonl#/f3d/921/0951-01; Unicode character offsets [9860:10078] (end exclusive); SHA-256 9548ccac58b96b23f4639dd698eb70e092ffa90878ae6553b9b59f22ede5657e.Joining an actual common unlawful undertaking requires more than dealing solely with an informant or knowing other offenders Leal applies the Tenth Circuit interdependence formulation: participants must advance a shared criminal objective. Separate agreements linked only through an informant were not one conspiracy. Other circuits express the common-objective rule through agreement/joinder; this constraint does not nationalize the Tenth Circuit's four-item instructions.