Supreme Court of Connecticut
State v. Ruiz-Pacheco
July 9, 2020336 Conn. 219
Summary
The court held that principal and accessory convictions for the same substantive assault offense are subject to a unit-of-prosecution double-jeopardy analysis. Because the assault statute did not clearly authorize multiple punishments for a single transaction, the court applied lenity and treated a continuous course of assaultive conduct as one offense. The defendant's convictions involving Tucker violated double jeopardy, while his convictions involving Rodriguez were permissible because a temporal, geographic, and motivational break separated the assaults.