In Ebeling v. Morgan, the defendant was convicted of breaking into a post office with intent to commit larceny and damaging government property in the process. The question before the Supreme Court was whether these two offenses could be charged separately or if they constituted one single offense under federal law. The court ruled that each act is a separate offense and can therefore be punished separately, even though both were committed simultaneously as part of one criminal episode. This ruling established an important precedent for how multiple charges arising from a single incident are handled in U.S legal system.

In the dissenting opinion for Ebeling v. Morgan, Justice Holmes argued that the defendants should not be charged with multiple offenses for a single act of breaking into a post office and stealing mail from several different compartments. He contended that charging them separately for each compartment violated their protection against double jeopardy under the Fifth Amendment. According to him, they had committed only one offense by breaking into the building with intent to steal mail, regardless of how many compartments were involved in their crime. The majority's interpretation would lead to absurd results if applied consistently; someone who stole letters from every mailbox in a large city could face thousands of charges instead of just one or two. Therefore, he believed that it was more reasonable and fairer to treat this as a single criminal act rather than multiple separate ones.