In the case of Hoag v. New Jersey, 1957, the U.S. Supreme Court addressed whether a defendant could be tried multiple times for crimes arising from a single act or transaction. The petitioner, Warren Hoag was charged with five counts of robbery and was acquitted on four but convicted on one count in his first trial in New Jersey state court. He appealed this conviction to the New Jersey Supreme Court which ordered a new trial due to errors made during jury instructions at his initial trial. At his second trial he was again convicted on one count and acquitted on three others (the fifth charge had been dropped). Hoag then appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court arguing that being tried twice violated his Fifth Amendment protection against double jeopardy. The U.S. Supreme Court upheld Hoag's conviction ruling that each victim constituted a separate offense thus allowing him to be retried without violating double jeopardy protections under federal law as it existed at that time.

In the dissenting opinion for Hoag v. New Jersey, Justice Frankfurter argued that the majority's decision undermined a fundamental principle of American law: protection against double jeopardy. He contended that by allowing multiple prosecutions for essentially the same offense, based on different victims involved in one criminal act, it violated this constitutional safeguard. The justice believed that such an approach could lead to prosecutorial abuse and harassment of defendants through repeated trials until a conviction is obtained. Furthermore, he pointed out inconsistencies with previous rulings where similar situations were treated as single offenses rather than separate ones depending on how many individuals were affected by them. Thus, he disagreed with the court's ruling which upheld Hoag’s convictions from three separate trials related to a single robbery incident involving five victims.