In Hagner et al. v. United States, the defendants were charged with conspiracy to defraud the U.S government by making false claims for veterans' benefits. The indictment was based on a single count but contained multiple charges of mail fraud as overt acts in furtherance of the conspiracy. The defense argued that each act should have been treated as separate offenses and thus, required individual indictments according to Fifth Amendment protections against double jeopardy. However, the Supreme Court ruled unanimously in favor of the prosecution stating that all alleged fraudulent acts could be considered part of one continuous scheme or plan constituting a single offense (conspiracy). Therefore, it upheld their conviction ruling that they were not subjected to double jeopardy because they had only been tried once for this singular crime despite its many components.

In the dissenting opinion for Hagner et al. v. United States, Justice Stone argued that the majority's decision to uphold a conviction based on an indictment with insufficient specificity contradicted previous rulings of the Court and undermined fundamental principles of justice. He contended that an indictment must clearly state all elements of a crime in order to provide adequate notice to defendants and prevent subsequent prosecutions for the same offense (double jeopardy). In this case, he believed that because the indictment did not specify which false statements were allegedly made by defendants in violation of federal law, it was too vague and should have been dismissed. Furthermore, he disagreed with the majority's view that evidence presented at trial could compensate for deficiencies in an indictment; instead asserting such approach would blur lines between grand jury findings necessary for prosecution and petit jury findings required for conviction.