82 BRENNAN, J., dissenting supra; Fong Foo v. United States, 369 U. S. 141 (1962). For however egregious the error of the acquittal, the termination favorable to the accused has been regarded as no different from a factfinder's acquittal that resulted from errors of the trial judge. See also Burks v. United States, ante, p. 1. These cases teach that the Government's means of protecting its vital interest in convicting the guilty is its participation as an adversary at the criminal trial where it has every opportunity to dissuade the trial court from committing erroneous rulings favorable to the accused. Jenkins was simply a necessary and logical extension of the rule that an acquittal bars any further trial proceedings. Jenkins recognized that an acquittal can never represent a determination that the criminal defendant is innocent in any absolute sense; the bar to a retrial following acquittal does not-and indeed could not-rest on any assumption that the finder of fact has applied the correct legal principles to all the admissible evidence and determined that the defendant was factually innocent of the offense charged. The reason further prosecution is barred following an acquittal, rather, is that the Government has been afforded one complete opportunity to prove a case of the criminal defendant's culpability and, when it has failed for any reason to persuade the court not to enter a final judgment favorable to the accused, the constitutional policies underlying the ban against multiple trials become compelling. Thus, Jenkins and Lee recognized that it mattered not whether the final judgment constituted a formal "acquittal." What is critical is whether the accused obtained, after jeopardy attached, a favorable termination of the charges against him. If he did, no matter how erroneous the ruling, the policies embodied in the Double Jeopardy Clause require the conclusion that "further proceedings... devoted to the resolution of factual issues going to the elements of the offense charged" are barred. Jenkins, 420 U. S., at 370; see Lee, 432 U. S., at 30. BRENNAN, J., dissenting 437 U.S. B The whole premise for today's retreat from Jenkins and Lee, of course, is the Court's new theory that a criminal defendant who seeks to avoid conviction on a "ground unrelated to factual innocence" somehow stands on a different constitutional footing from a defendant whose participation in his criminal trial creates a situation in which a judgment of acquittal has to be entered. This premise is simply untenable. The rule prohibiting retrials following acquittals does not and could not rest on a conclusion that the accused was factually innocent in any meaningful sense. If that were the basis for the rule, the decisions that have held that even egregiously erroneous acquittals preclude retrials, see, e. g., Fong Foo v. United States, supra (acquittal entered after three of many prosecution witnesses had testified); Sanabria v. United States, ante, p. 54, were erroneous. It is manifest that the reasons that bar a retrial following an acquittal are equally applicable to a final judgment entered on a ground "unrelated to factual innocence." The heavy personal strain of the second trial is the same in either case. So too is the risk that, though innocent, the defendant may be found guilty at a second trial. If the appeal is allowed in either situation, the Government will, following any reversal, not only obtain the benefit of the favorable appellate ruling but also be permitted to shore up any other weak points of its case and obtain all the other advantages at the second trial that the Double Jeopardy Clause was designed to forbid. Moreover, the Government's interest in retrying a defendant simply cannot vary depending on the ground of the final termination in the accused's favor. I reject as plainly erroneous the Court's suggestion that final judgments not based on innocence deprive the public of "its valued right to 'one complete opportunity to convict those who have violated its laws,'" ante, at 100, quoting Arizona v. Washington, 434 82 BRENNAN, J., dissenting U. S., at 509, and therefore differ from "true acquittals." The Government has the same "complete opportunity" in either situation by virtue of its participation as an adversary at the criminal trial." Equally significant, the distinction between the two is at best purely formal. Many acquittals are the consequence of rulings of law made on the accused's motion that are not related to the question of his factual guilt or innocence: e. g., a ruling on the law respecting the scope of the offense or excluding reliable evidence. Sanabria v. United States, ante, p. 54, illustrates the point. 6 Similarly unpersuasive is the Court's suggestion that its holding is supported by the well-recognized rules that a criminal defendant may twice be tried for the same offense if he either successfully moved for a mistrial at the first trial, see Lee, supra; United States v. Dinitz, 424 U. S. 600 (1976), or succeeded in having a conviction set aside on a ground other than the insufficiency of the evidence. See United States v. Ball, 163 U. S. 662 (1896). What distinguishes these situations, of course, is that neither involved a final judgment entered for the accused and that in both the Government could not be said to have had a complete opportunity to convict the accused. "The Court's suggestion that intervening decisions have somehow undermined Jenkins simply will not wash. Although it is quite true that the author of the Court opinion has stated that he understood Jenkins to embrace a rule that any midtrial termination that is labeled a "dismissal" erects a double jeopardy bar, see ante, at 86 n. 2, quoting Lee, 432 U. S., at 36 (REHNQUIST, J., concurring), no Court opinion has adopted the position that the label attached to a trial court's ruling could be determinative. Indeed, since Serfass v. United States, 420 U. S 377, 392 (1975), which was decided the week after Jenkins, explicitly provides that labels are not to have such talismanic significance, the unanimous Court in Jenkins could scarcely have contemplated that it had announced such a mechanical formula. Thus, the Court's suggestion, see ante, at 94, that Lee, which held that a termination that was labeled a "dismissal" did not erect a double jeopardy bar, could have undermined Jenkins is unpersuasive on its face. In Lee, we treated the dismissal as the equivalent of a mistrial because both the trial judge and the parties had so regarded it. See 432 U. S., at 29. BRENNAN, J., dissenting 437 U.S. In Sanabria, the District Court, acting on the defendant's motions, made a series of erroneous legal rulings which began with an erroneous construction of the indictment and culminated in the exclusion of most of the evidence of defendant's guilt. The trial court then granted defendant's motion for a judgment of acquittal on the ground that the remaining evidence was insufficient. Sanabria held that the midtrial termination of the prosecution erected an absolute bar to any further proceedings against the defendant, and we reached that result even though the rulings which led to the acquittal were purely legal determinations, unrelated to any question of defendant's factual guilt, and had been precipitated entirely by the defendant's "voluntary choice" to seek a narrow construction of his indictment. Here the legal ruling that the Court characterizes as unrelated to the defendant's factual guilt itself terminated the prosecution with prejudice. In Sanabria, after the District Court rendered the two erroneous rulings that excluded most of the relevant evidence of defendant's guilt, it remained for the trial court to take the pro forma step of granting the defendant's motion for a judgment of acquittal. Surely, this difference between the cases should not possess constitutional significance. By holding that it does, the Court suggests that the present case would have been decided differently if the trial court had remedied the due process violation by excluding all the Government's evidence on count one and then entering an acquittal pursuant to Rule 29. Sanabria simply confirms that the distinction the Court today draws is wholly arbitrary, bearing no conceivable relationship to the policies protected by the Double Jeopardy Clause. II The Court's definition of "acquittal" compounds the damage that repudiation of Jenkins and Lee has done to the fabric of double jeopardy law. Not only is this definition unduly 82 BRENNAN, J., dissenting restrictive, it is literally incapable of principled application. The Court's application of its definition to the facts of this case proves the point. The doctrine of preindictment delay, like a host of other principles and policies of the law-e. g., entrapment, insanity, right to speedy trial, statute of limitations-operates to preclude the imposition of criminal liability on defendants, notwithstanding a showing that they committed criminal acts. Like these other doctrines, the question whether preindictment delay violates due process of law cannot ordinarily be considered apart from the factual development at trial since normally only the ""[e]vents of the trial [can demonstrate] actual prejudice.'" United States v. Lovasco, 431 U. S. 783, 789 (1977), quoting United States v. Marion, 404 U. S. 307, 326 (1971); see United States v. MacDonald, 435 U. S. 850, 858, 858-859 (1978). Here, therefore, the District Court, quite properly, deferred consideration of the respondent's pretrial motion to dismiss for preaccusation delay until trial. At the close of the evidence, respondent renewed his motion. The District Court recognized that there was sufficient evidence of guilt to permit submission of count one to the jury, but granted the motion as to this count because, evaluating the facts adduced at trial, the court found that the delay between the offense alleged and respondent's indictment had been unjustifiable and had so prejudiced respondent's ability to present his defense as to constitute a denial of due process of law. A critical feature of today's holding appears to be the Court's definition of acquittal as ""a resolution [in the defendant's favor], correct or not, of some or all of the factual elements of the offense charged,'" ante, at 97, quoting United States v. Martin Linen Supply Co., 430 U. S., at 571. But this definition, which is narrower than the traditional one, enjoys no significant support in our prior decisions. The language quoted from Martin Linen Supply Co. was tied to the par |