News on Youtube Nov 21 2018

In 2008, Terance Gamble was convicted of robbery in Alabama, served his time.

Seven years later, he was pulled over for a broken tail light.

The police then smelled marijuana, searched his car, and found a couple of guns.

Now, since he was a convicted felon, he was violating the felon in possession laws, both

federal and state, and that's important because not only was he convicted under Alabama's

law against felons possessing firearms, but he then was prosecuted and convicted under

federal law.

So, the issue here is, does that double prosecution violate the Constitution's protection against

double jeopardy?

Double jeopardy protects against being tried more than once for the same crime.

This comes from the Fifth Amendment. If you're acquitted the state can't say, "Oh,

now we have more evidence.

Let's try you again."

But interestingly, there's an exception to that when there are two sovereigns involved;

that is, the states and the federal government are separate sovereigns and so the states,

as happened here, can prosecute completely separate from whatever the federal government

can do.

And so the question here is, does that violate this fundamental constitutional right against

double jeopardy?

Going back to common law, this is not a new thing.

In old England, there was a big concern about the crown prosecuting people multiple times

if they didn't like the result they were originally getting.

This even came up in the context of two sovereigns.

There were cases where an Englishman was acquitted of murder in South Africa, in Holland, and

then they were brought back and the crown tried to prosecute them and the courts weren't

having it.

And so when the United States was created, one of the fundamental protections that the

framers decided to put in was this protection against double jeopardy.

Now of course, the Fifth Amendment, the Bill of Rights, originally only applied to the

new federal government, uh, and it wasn't until much later, uh, in fact, this century,

that, uh, the double jeopardy provision was incorporated or applied to the states.

The best argument for Terance Gamble is that it doesn't matter which sovereign is prosecuting

him, he's still being tried twice for the same crime and whatever judicially-made doctrine

needs to be changed to protect his constitutional rights, the Court should follow that.

The best argument for the United States is simply that we might not like the outcome

in this or any particular case but we do have dual sovereigns.

States are indeed separate from the federal government and we can look to the discretion

of prosecutors, both federal and state.

The federal government sometimes has very good reason to try someone a second time.

We saw this in the Rodney King situation 25 years ago, where the state court acquitted

the police officers in the beginning but then federal prosecutors secured a civil rights

violation conviction.

The Court should maintain this understanding that, uh, even if, uh, sometimes we don't

like it, that these are indeed separate sovereigns.

And so they want to, uh, continue, uh, keeping,

uh, Mr. Gamble's conviction on the books and- and keep him in prison until, uh, his full

term expires in 2020.