Can a defendant be acquitted due to contradictory charges?

Question

As a logician I'm always on the lookout for anecdotes about how classical logic doesn't fully align with legal standards in criminal cases. To make my life harder, fate likes to present me with examples that are completely unsuitable for classroom use.

For instance, we have a Reddit comment where someone claiming to be a former prosecutor shared the following story:

[...] we had this guy charged with sexual battery on someone physically helpless and abuse of a dead body. [The victim died at some point, and the medical examiner could not determine whether the act purported to be sexual battery happened pre or post mortem.] So, at trial, guy was acquitted [...] Can't have a sexual battery on someone who's dead and can't abuse a dead body if they're alive.

Unfortunately, beyond its sheer unsuitability for classroom discussion, I also find the scenario described highly improbable and doubt that the events described (or similar) ever actually happened. However, the comment received many upvotes and no challenges, so I am starting to doubt my judgment a little.

Question: I'm seeking evidence in the form of historical cases/applications ending with acquittal where a materially similar situation unfolded. Negatively, an explanation why the described chain of events, from a legal perspective, is too implausible to have occurred in any major common law jurisdiction.

Credible sources (e.g. newspaper articles) describing the event would be more than sufficient.

I am not looking for:

• Lists of cases where the prosecution established that one of two crimes occurred but failed to prove any specific crime (unless the crimes, material facts or circumstances are strikingly similar to the reddit anecdote linked above).

• Hypotheticals (what would happen if...) except to point out procedural, legal, etc. impossibilities in the Reddit comment's scenario that are blatant enough to warrant dismissing the comment as fiction.

Answer 1

No. This scenario would not be possible in most common law jurisdictions as prosecutors can just raise alternative charges. Legal systems are designed to avoid the outcomes described in the Reddit comment. This explains why you and I could not find any reported case resembling the comment or anything similar.

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In england-and-wales, the case of R v Dunn (Henry) [2021] is instructive. This made a distinction between:

1. True Alternative Charges, and
2. Forensic Alternative Charges

Your question is about True Alternative Charges (mutually exclusive charges where conviction on one necessarily excludes conviction on the other). Forensic Alternative Charges, on the other hand, address distinct offences but may arise from the same facts.

The case gives guidance on how courts should distinguish True Alternative Charges and Forensic Alternative charges from one another. This is because there is no formal difference in the process of raising either. It is up to the courts to identify the type of alternative charges raised by the prosecution.

The acknowledgement that True Alternative Charges are allowed to be pursued clarifies that the scenario you describe is not possible. If two charges are mutually exclusive (such as the ones you describe), the courts will view them as True Alternative Charges and will simply acknowledge that there cannot be a conviction in both. This still allows for the possibility of being convicted of charge A or charge B - just not both.

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Applying this to your scenario would see two charges raised:

• sexual battery on someone physically helpless, and
• abuse of a dead body

These are mutually exclusive charges. As the Reddit comment correctly notes you cannot have both, they would simply be labelled as True Alternative Charges by the court and considered separately. Assuming that the defendant is found guilty, they can only be convicted of one of these two charges. The fact that both charges cannot coexist would not, however, lead to an acquittal.

Answer 2

I think you may have misinterpreted the example (which we'll suppose is valid for now).

The setup of the story is:

• For charge A, Prosecution must prove "X did Y before Z".

• For Charge B, Prosecution must prove "X did Y after Z".

But the jury found the Prosecution only proved "X did Y", and so in particular failed to establish the particular timings "before Z" or "after Z". Thus neither charge A nor charge B was proven and so a not guilty verdict is returned on them. This is an issue of the specificity of the charges. Their potential exclusivity (here, both could have happened) is just a side effect, not the core problem. Charges must be proven in their entirety, so if some necessary element fails to be proven then the jury should return a "not guilty" verdict. Which is what happened in the story here. The problem was the prosecutor not charging them with a crime that would cover this edge case; potentially because there was no law that allowed them to.

People getting off on technicalities and loopholes like this is an actual thing in the real world and common as a storytelling trope. Sometimes, when it happens for real, this results in laws getting updated to remove the loophole. In this case maybe the legislature would pass a law that creates a crime and punishment for this edge case where the timing is not clearly established. Or not. This would largely depend upon the amount of public outrage that arises from the case.

Answer 3

If there is an acquittal on both charges, and those charges are irrevocably inconsistent, then the acquittals can't be appealed and we never find out why the jury chose to acquit. It could be because neither charge could be proven beyond a reasonable doubt because it isn't clear which one was committed. But we don't know that for sure. It could be that the jury acquitted because the jury didn't believe that either crime was committed.

If there is a conviction on two irrevocably inconsistent charges, then the convictions are vacated on appeal and the case is remanded for a new trial.