Page:United States Reports 502 OCT. TERM 1991.pdf/213

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Cite as: 502 U. S. 46 (1991)

55

Opinion of the Court

of the separable acts submitted was insufficient.” Id., at 36, n. 45.1 A host of our decisions, both before and after Yates, has applied what Williams called “the rule of the Stromberg case” to general-verdict convictions that may have rested on an unconstitutional ground. See, e. g., Bachellar v. Maryland, 397 U. S. 564, 570–571 (1970); Leary v. United States, 395 U. S. 6, 31–32 (1969); Street v. New York, 394 U. S. 576, 585–588 (1969); Terminiello v. Chicago, 337 U. S. 1, 5 (1949); Thomas v. Collins, 323 U. S. 516, 529 (1945). Cf. Zant v. Stephens, 462 U. S. 862, 880–884 (1983) (rejecting contention that Stromberg required a death sentence to be set aside if one of several statutory aggravating circumstances underlying the jury verdict was unconstitutionally vague). Yates, however, was the first and only case of ours to apply Stromberg to a general verdict in which one of the possible bases of conviction did not violate any provision of the Constitution but was simply legally inadequate (because of a statutory time bar). As we have described, that was an unexplained 1 At the outset of its discussion of the two overt acts, the Cramer Court said: “At the present stage of the case we need not weigh their sufficiency as a matter of pleading. Whatever the averments might have permitted the Government to prove, we now consider their adequacy on the proof as made.” 325 U. S., at 37. Petitioner suggests this means that Cramer was a sufficiency-of-the-evidence case—a point relevant to our later analysis, see infra, at 58–59. That suggestion is mistaken. As is apparent from the Court’s full discussion, “adequacy on the proof as made” meant not whether the evidence sufficed to enable an alleged fact to be found, but rather whether the facts adduced at trial sufficed in law to constitute overt acts of treason. Thus the Court could say: “It is not relevant to our issue to appraise weight or credibility of the evidence apart from determining its constitutional sufficiency.” 325 U. S., at 43. The Court of Appeals’ opinion in Cramer makes even clearer that legal as opposed to evidentiary sufficiency was at issue; it specifically distinguishes the case from those in which multiple overt acts sufficient in law are submitted to the jury and the conviction is upheld as long as the evidence suffices to show one of them. See United States v. Cramer, 137 F. 2d 888, 893–894 (CA2 1943).