[JURIST] The US
Supreme Court [official website] ruled Tuesday in
Bravo-Fernandez v. US [opinion, PDF] that the
double jeopardy clause
[Cornell LII backgrounder] does not bar the government from retrying
defendants after a jury has returned inconsistent verdicts and the
convictions are later vacated due to legal error unrelated to the
inconsistency of the jury. The court relied heavily on the precedent set
by
Ashe v. Swenson
[opinion] that the issue-preclusion component of the double jeopardy
clause does not mean that defendants cannot be retried on acquittal
unless it is "determined by a valid and final judgment of acquittal."
Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg delivered the opinion for a unanimous court:
One
cannot know from the jury's report why it returned no verdict. "A host
of reasons" could account for a jury's failure to decide—"sharp
disagreement, confusion about the issues, exhaustion after a long trial,
to name but a few." ... But actual inconsistency in a jury's verdicts
is a reality; vacatur of a conviction for unrelated legal error does not
reconcile the jury's inconsistent returns. We ... affirm the judgment
of the Court of Appeals, which held that issue preclusion does not apply
when verdict inconsistency renders unanswerable "what the jury
necessarily decided."
The court ruled that the charges that
the defendant's were acquitted on are final and may never be retried,
however the charge of bribery that they were found guilty of can be
retried due to legal error. Justice Clarence Thomas filed a concurring
opinion.In this case, the defendants, Bravo and Martinez, were found guilty by a jury of bribery in violation of
18 USC §666
[text]. The jury also acquitted them of conspiring to violate §666 and
traveling in interstate commerce to violate §666. The guilty verdict
were later vacated on appeal because of error in the judge's
instructions unrelated to the verdicts' inconsistency. The Supreme Court
heard
arguments [JURIST report] in this case in October.
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