Cite as: 509 U. S. 688 (1993)
Opinion of the Court
must sometimes bring its prosecutions for [separate] offenses together." Post, at 747. The collateral-estoppel effect attributed to the Double Jeopardy Clause, see Ashe v. Swenson, 397 U. S. 436 (1970), may bar a later prosecution for a separate offense where the Government has lost an earlier prosecution involving the same facts. But this does not establish that the Government "must . . . bring its prosecutions . . . together." It is entirely free to bring them separately, and can win convictions in both. Of course the collateral-estoppel issue is not raised in this case.
Justice Souter relies upon four cases to establish the existence of some minimal antecedents to Grady. Post, at 749-758. The fountainhead of the "same-conduct" rule, he asserts, is In re Nielsen, 131 U. S. 176 (1889). That is demonstrably wrong. Nielsen simply applies the common proposition, entirely in accord with Blockburger, that prosecution for a greater offense (cohabitation, defined to require proof of adultery) bars prosecution for a lesser included offense (adultery). That is clear from the Nielsen Court's framing of the question ("Being of opinion, therefore, that habeas corpus was a proper remedy for the petitioner, if the crime of adultery with which he was charged was included in the crime of unlawful cohabitation for which he was convicted and punished, that question is now to be considered," 131 U. S., at 185 (emphasis added)), from its legal analysis, id., at 186-189, and from its repeated observations that cohabitation required proof of adultery, id., at 187, 189.10
10 Justice Souter has apparently been led astray by his misinterpretation of the word "incidents" in the following passage of Nielsen: "[W]here, as in this case, a person has been tried and convicted for a crime which has various incidents included in it, he cannot be a second time tried for one of those incidents without being twice put in jeopardy for the same offence." 131 U. S., at 188. He apparently takes "incident" to mean "event" or "conduct." See post, at 752, and n. 5, 757-758. What it obviously means, however, is "element." See Black's Law Dictionary 762 (6th ed. 1990) (defining "incidents of ownership"); J. Bouvier, Law Dictionary 783-784 (1883) (defining "incident" and giving examples of "incident to a
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