United States v. Merlino, 310 F.3d 137 (3d Cir. 2002)

Third Circuit opinion of November 8, 2002 holding that "Not Proven" answers on a special verdict sheet in an earlier Philadelphia RICO trial did not bar a New Jersey murder-in-aid-of-racketeering prosecution.

Date: 2002-11-08
Kind: court-opinion
Source: CourtListener (Free Law Project), text of the opinion
Retrieved: 2026-10-12
Docket: No. 01-4041
Rights: Opinion of a United States court. Works of the federal judiciary are in the public domain in the United States. The text was read on CourtListener.

United States Court of Appeals, Third Circuit, November 8, 2002. “Appellant Joseph Merlino has been charged in the District of New Jersey with advancing a racketeering enterprise, the Philadelphia La Cosa Nostra Family, by participating in the murder” of a man the court names. Merlino argued that the jury in his earlier trial in the Eastern District of Pennsylvania had already decided the question in his favor.

The court held: “under the unusual circumstances of this case, Merlino cannot prove that the jury decided in his favor when they checked the ‘Not Proven’ boxes corresponding to the” murder racketeering acts, and so he could not invoke collateral estoppel. It affirmed the denial of his motion to dismiss.

This page keeps to the court’s procedural account. The New Jersey charge is an indictment’s allegation as the court describes it.

itemUnited States v. Merlino, 349 F.3d 144 (3d Cir. 2003)Third Circuit opinion of November 12, 2003 on the appeals of seven defendants convicted in 2001 on an indictment naming the Philadelphia La Cosa Nostra family as the RICO enterprise; the jury had found the murder racketeering acts not proven.