LEGAL UPDATE: DOUBLE JEOPARDY CLAUSE IN JEOPARDY?

What do you think?

[Washington, D.C.; Thursday, 05/24/2012]

In a 6 to 3 decision by the U.S. Supreme Court, an Arkansas man, Alex Blueford, can now be retried for capital murder after a jury in his 2009 trial voted to acquit him of a capital murder but deadlocked on lesser charges.

Blueford was charged with murdering his girlfriend's 20-month-old son, who died of a head injury.

Prosecutors had waived the death penalty but charged Mr. Blueford with capital murder in order to seek life in prison without the possibility of parole, alleging he injured the child intentionally. The defendant said he knocked the boy down by accident.

The trial judge told jurors that if they didn't believe Mr. Blueford was guilty on the capital-murder charge, they should consider whether he was guilty of a series of lesser offenses: first-degree murder, manslaughter or negligent homicide.

The jury forewoman reported that the jury was "hopelessly" deadlocked. Jurors were "unanimous against" a conviction for capital murder or first-degree murder, she said, but deadlocked 9-3 on whether to convict the defendant of manslaughter. After another 30 minutes, jurors returned again to say they couldn't reach a verdict. The judge declared a mistrial.

When the state moved to retry Mr. Blueford, he sought dismissal of the murder charges, while conceding he could be retried for manslaughter. The case turned into a battle over the interpretation of the Constitution's double-jeopardy clause, which protects a defendant from being tried for the same offense twice.

Chief Justice John Roberts, in a 6-3 opinion for the court, said the forewoman's report on the state of deliberations wasn't a formal finding of acquittal on the capital-murder or first-degree-murder charges. He observed that the jury had continued to deliberate after the forewoman's report, and said jurors were free to reconsider whether Mr. Blueford was guilty of a greater offense. The jury, he said, didn't exercise either of the two options provided by Arkansas law: convict Mr. Blueford on one of the offenses or acquit him on all them.

"When the jury was unable to return a verdict, the trial court properly declared a mistrial and discharged the jury," Chief Justice Roberts wrote in a 10-page opinion. "As a consequence, the Double Jeopardy Clause does not stand in the way of a second trial on the same offenses."
The court's four other conservative justices and one member of the court's liberal wing, Justice Stephen Breyer, joined the decision.

Mr. Blueford and his supporters relied on two earlier Supreme Court rulings, from 1957 and 1970, in which the court ruled that a defendant is implicitly acquitted of more severe charges when a jury chooses to convict only of a lesser offense. The court said in both decisions that the protection against double jeopardy prohibits a second trial on the greater offense.

Mr. Blueford argued that the double-jeopardy clause should afford him even more protection because he wasn't convicted of the lesser offense either. Chief Justice Roberts said those cases were different because they involved final jury verdicts, while this case did not.

Justice Sonia Sotomayor, writing for the dissenters, said the decision unfairly gave prosecutors a "second bite at the apple" because the jury "unmistakably announced acquittal" on the capital and first-degree murder charges. "That ought to be the end of the matter," she wrote.

Justice Sotomayor said the court's ruling departed from the "long-established" principle that double jeopardy could come into play even if an initial prosecution didn't result in a conviction or acquittal.

[WSJ, Friday, 05/25/2012]

What do you think about this story?