In the 1998 case of Eddie Richardson v. United States, the Supreme Court addressed whether a federal court could increase a defendant's sentence based on conduct for which he had been acquitted in state court. The petitioner, Eddie Richardson, was convicted in federal court for possession of crack cocaine with intent to distribute and sentenced under guidelines that took into account his prior acquittal on murder charges related to drug trafficking. He argued this violated his rights under the Double Jeopardy Clause of the Fifth Amendment. However, the Supreme Court upheld his sentence stating that an acquittal does not prove innocence but rather reflects merely an absence of proof beyond reasonable doubt in criminal proceedings; thus it can be considered during sentencing without violating double jeopardy protections.

In the dissenting opinion for Eddie Richardson v. United States, it was argued that the majority's decision to uphold Richardson's conviction under a federal drug law was incorrect because it failed to require jury unanimity on which specific violations constituted his "continuing series" of violations. The dissenters believed this violated Richardson’s Sixth Amendment right to a trial by jury, as jurors may not have agreed on which three acts he committed out of many alleged ones. They also pointed out that the Court had previously held in Schad v. Arizona and McKoy v. North Carolina that when state law identifies separate ways one can commit an offense, juries must agree unanimously about which way the defendant is guilty; they saw no reason why federal trials should be different from state trials in this respect.