This article about Roger Clemens says “The indictment . . . cites 15 distinct instances of Clemens obstructing Congress.” Yet, somehow this translates into an indictment of only 6 counts.
How do “counts” work? Why doesn’t the amount of “instances” something happens translate into an individual “count?”
–SMM
I’ll bump this up just once - I know there are law types out there who can answer this! (Unless they’re all on vacation.)
–SMM
I can reply from a Canadian perspective - don’t know how applicable it is to US federal criminal procedure.
When items are part of a related transaction, prosecutors may charge them as one single count, even though each item may technically qualify as a separate breach of the law. The police will tend to charge items separately, but it’s the Crown prosecutor’s job to review the separate charges and determine if some of them really qualify as different aspects of the same overall offence, and therefore merit only one count. The Crown’s job is to make the indictment reasonably fair - some complicated events could contain many technical offences, but if they’re all part of only one or two major transactions, then the information or indictment should be based on that approach, rather then several smaller charges.
I don’t know anything about the Clemons matter, but hypothetically, if he appeared in front of the committee, and several different committee members asked him the same question, and he gave them each individually the same answer, you might argue that technically each time he gave that answer he was allegedly perjuring himself. However, if all the questions and answers on that point occurred in the space of a short time, and were all follow-up questions to his initial testimony, it may be arguable that it’s really only one episode of perjury, stated repeatedly, and therefore should only warrant one count.
As I said, I don’t know the details of the Clemons matter, so that’s just hypothetical speculation on my part - we’ll have to wait and see what comes out as it moves towards a trial.