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136 Wash. 2d 629

State v. Adel

Washington Supreme Court

Decided October 15, 1998

Washington Supreme Court · decided 1998-10-15

Key passage — most relied on by later courts

“[T]he unit of prosecution approach to double jeopardy is necessarily one that must develop on a case-by-case basis. There may be circumstances in future cases where the jurisdictional or temporal differences in the possession of illegal substances may be so great as to suggest completely distinct units of prosecution.”

quoted by 2 later decisions, including State v. Tili, Townsend v. State

Relies on Bell v. United States · Ebeling v. Morgan

Good law ✅— No negative treatment on recordhow we know

Decided 1998-10-15

How this case has been cited

Cited by 74 later decisions — most recently September 2013 · most notably State v. Adel (1998), State v. Tili (1999)

74 state decisions

600199820002010decided

Later decisions citing this case, by decade. The current decade is in progress, and our corpus holds fewer opinions from the most recent years, so the latest bars are undercounted — not a real decline.

View the full empirical analysis of this case →

Talmadge, J.

¶1(concurring) — I concur specially to emphasize the unit of prosecution approach to double jeopardy is necessarily one that must develop on a case-by-case basis. There may be circumstances in future cases where the jurisdictional or temporal differences in the possession of illegal substances may be so great as to suggest completely distinct units of prosecution. For example, if a person were arrested in Seattle for possessing 20 grams of marijuana, and Spokane police served a search warrant on the person’s Spokane residence and found 15 grams of marijuana on that same day, two distinct units of prosecution might exist. Similarly, if a person were in possession of 20 grams of marijuana and used the substance in its entirety, and, thereafter, several days later acquired another 15 grams of *641marijuana for personal use, two distinct units of prosecution are likely present under such circumstances.

¶2The unit of prosecution approach to analyzing double jeopardy is appropriate, but is not completely without difficulty in its application. Compare, Bell v. United States, 349 U.S. 81, 75 S. Ct. 620, 99 L. Ed. 905 (1955), and Ebeling v. Morgan, 237 U.S. 625, 35 S. Ct. 710, 59 L. Ed. 1151 (1915). We must be sensitive to different factual patterns in utilizing the unit of prosecution approach to determine if there is multiple punishment for purposes of the double jeopardy clause.

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