Why is protection from double jeopardy important

However, this is far from true. Under the United States Constitution, you have many protections when you face criminal charges. For example, you have a right to be given your Miranda warnings when you are taken into custody. Another important right you have is the protection against double jeopardy. The right against double jeopardy is another right that people have under the Fifth Amendment to the U. In Benton v. This is because juvenile courts have the option to try a minor as an adult.

If that court tries the individual as a juvenile, then another trial court may not try that same individual as an adult for the same crime, as doing so would violate the double jeopardy rule. Ursery , US , the Supreme Court held that civil property forfeitures did not constitute a "punishment" for purposes of the double jeopardy clause.

The civil property forfeiture is a remedial civil sanction, and not a punitive criminal "punishment. Please help us improve our site! No thank you. Incorporation As with all Amendments to the U. Civil Sanctions In United States v. This time, a jury found Palko guilty of first-degree murder, and the judge sentenced him to death.

Palko appealed to the U. Supreme Court. He argued that the Fourteenth Amendment incorporated, or included, the Fifth Amendment prohibition of double jeopardy as a restriction on the power of the states. Justice Benjamin Cardozo, writing for the majority, rejected this position. Over the next few decades, they would consider the issue case by case. But this course did not mean the Court was backing away from the ancient ban on double jeopardy; indeed, in some ways its commitment was stronger than ever, as a case from the s revealed.

Everett Green was a mild-mannered man in his early sixties when District of Columbia police arrested him in for the murder of his longtime friend Bettie Brown. They lived in the same boardinghouse, and Green looked after Brown as her health began to fail.

No one had any reason to suspect him of anything other than devotion, but when firefighters found the elderly woman dead in a burning house, with Everett unconscious in a bloody bathtub upstairs, they uncovered disturbing conflicts between the evidence and his account of what happened. At the hospital where he had been taken, Green told investigators about an intruder who had attacked him with a knife. He could not explain how the man had gotten into the locked house, which still was bolted when the firemen arrived, nor why his assailant had set fires in five locations throughout the residence.

Later, the detectives returned with damning evidence that pointed directly to him as the murderer of Bettie Brown. Green acknowledged the letter. He said he had found Bettie Brown dead when he checked on her the night before the fire; she had died in her sleep, and, depressed, he contemplated suicide. Then the intruder attacked him. He stuck with this story when testifying in his own defense at his trial for arson and murder, even though a medical examiner said Brown had died of smoke inhalation.

Upon cross-examination, however, he revealed that both he and Brown had been threatened with eviction more than once, including the day before the fire. They believed they soon would be institutionalized. The jury found Green guilty of arson and second-degree murder, and the judge sentenced him to one to three years in prison for arson and five to twenty years for murder.

Given his age, the term could be a life sentence. Dissatisfied with the verdict, the defense attorney combed the trial record for a mistake to justify a reversal of the conviction.

This instruction was wrong; the criminal code required a verdict on the charge of first-degree murder if the death was caused by arson. Now Everett Green had to make a critical decision. If he succeeded in overturning the verdict, the state might try him for first-degree murder; if found guilty in a new trial, he could be put to death. Green was willing to take the risk because, he told his lawyer, his current sentence meant he likely would die in prison.

The trial judge erred, the court of appeals agreed; Green would have a new trial. But before the second trial began, his attorney advanced a new defense. Green had already been tried once on the charge of first-degree murder, and when the jury found him guilty of second-degree murder, it implicitly found him not guilty of the more serious crime. Trying him again would be a violation of his Fifth Amendment protection against double jeopardy. It was a novel argument, and even his attorney doubted its success.

In fact, the U. The trial judge rejected the double jeopardy claim, and this time the jury found Everett Green guilty of murder in the first degree. His gamble had failed; now he faced death by electrocution. When the court of appeals rejected his petition for a new trial, noting he had been warned about the possible consequences of his actions, Green asked the Supreme Court to hear his case.

The justices heard arguments in the case on two different occasions—they could not reach a decision the first time—before issuing their opinion in fall The retrial, they concluded, violated the Fifth Amendment ban on double jeopardy. Green was in direct peril of being convicted and punished for first degree murder at his first trial, but the jury refused to convict him. He did not waive his double jeopardy right by appealing his conviction.

If such great constitutional protections are given a narrow, grudging application they are deprived of much of their significance. It protects against a second prosecution for the same offense after acquittal. It protects against a second prosecution for the same offense after conviction.

And it protects against multiple punishments for the same offense. After years of anxiety, frustration, and expense, Everett Green was a free man, even if he remained poor and sick. In Green v. United States , the Supreme Court made a strong statement about the value of the ban on double jeopardy, and because of it, Everett Green had his freedom. But this was one case.