Heath v. Alabama

Heath v. Alabama, 474 U.S. 82 (1985), is a case in which the United States Supreme Court ruled that, because of the doctrine of "dual sovereignty" (the concept that the United States and each state possess sovereignty – a consequence of federalism ), the double jeopardy clause of the Fifth Amendment to the Constitution does not prohibit one state from prosecuting and punishing somebody for an act of which they had already been convicted of and sentenced for in another state.

This decision is one of several that holds that the Fifth Amendment does not forbid the U.S. federal government and a state government, or the governments of more than one state, from prosecuting the same individual separately for the same illegal act.

Contents

• 1 Background

• 2 Facts and procedural history

• 3 Decision

• 4 Dissent

  • 4.1 Justice Marshall's dissent

  • 4.2 Justice Brennan's dissent

• 5 Subsequent history

• 6 References

• 7 External links

Background

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The Fifth Amendment to the Constitution of the United States says:

No person shall be held to answer for a capital, or otherwise infamous crime, unless on a presentment or indictment of a Grand Jury, except in cases arising in the land or naval forces, or in the Militia, when in actual service in time of War or public danger; nor shall any person be subject for the same offence to be twice put in jeopardy of life or limb; nor shall be compelled in any criminal case to be a witness against himself, nor be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor shall private property be taken for public use, without just compensation.

The clause "nor shall any person be subject for the same offence to be twice put in jeopardy of life or limb" means that the government cannot re-prosecute somebody for a crime of which he or she has been found "not guilty"; likewise, the government cannot appeal against a verdict of acquittal. However, the first ten amendments to the Constitution , known as the Bill of Rights , were originally interpreted as binding only on the Federal government ; for example, the First Amendment, which guarantees freedom of religion, expressly begins with the words, "Congress shall make no law . . . ." It was not until the passage of the Fourteenth Amendment , the first section of which says, in part, "No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws" that any serious consideration was given to the proposition that the Bill of Rights is binding on the states.

Since then, the decisions of the United States Supreme Court have gradually evolved so as to include most state actions within the scope of the Bill of Rights. In _Benton v. Maryland _, 395 U.S. 784 (1969), the Supreme Court held that the Fifth Amendment prohibition against double jeopardy applies to the states. Nevertheless, each U.S. state has long been considered to have its own sovereignty, which it shares with the U.S. federal government ; thus, the question of whether more than one state can punish the same individual for the same set of actions was left open.

Facts and procedural history

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In 1981, the defendant , Larry Gene Heath (October 5, 1951 – March 20, 1992), traveled from Russell County, Alabama , to Troup County, Georgia , where he met with two other individuals whom he had hired to kill his pregnant wife Rebecca. They returned with him to his house and, after he left the scene, they kidnapped his wife to Troup County, where they killed her in exchange for $2,000. He was arrested later that year and, on February 10, 1982, pled guilty in a Georgia court to the crime of murder, and was sentenced to life imprisonment.

Subsequently, a grand jury in Alabama, his state of residence, indicted him for the crime of murder during a kidnapping, and he entered a plea of "_autrefois convict _ and former jeopardy under the Alabama and United States Constitutions," by which he stated that he was not eligible to be punished in Alabama because a Georgia court had already convicted and sentenced him for the same crime, and that the crime had, in fact, not taken place in Alabama. The prosecutor argued, however, that because the defendant's wife had been kidnapped in Alabama, the murder "may be punished" there. On January 12, 1983, a jury in the Alabama court convicted Heath of "murder during a kidnapping in the first degree," a capital offense, He was sentenced to death, and the Alabama Court of Criminal Appeals affirmed this decision on direct appeal. The Alabama Supreme Court, after granting certiorari, affirmed the decision of the lower court as well.

The United States Supreme Court then granted _certiorari _ to determine whether the conviction of Heath violated the precedent that had been set by an earlier case, _Brown v. Ohio _, 432 U.S. 161 (1977), in which the Court had held that one cannot be punished consecutively for two different offenses if the proof of both offenses is identical.

Decision

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Writing for a 7–2 majority, Justice O'Connor ruled that "the dual sovereignty doctrine . . . compels the conclusion that successive prosecutions by two States for the same conduct are not barred by the Double Jeopardy Clause." "The dual sovereignty doctrine," she wrote, "is founded on the common-law conception of crime as an offense against the sovereignty of the government. When a defendant in a single act violates the 'peace and dignity' of two sovereigns by breaking the laws of each, he has committed two distinct 'offences.' United States v. Lanza, 260 U.S. 377, 382, 43 S.Ct. 141, 67 L.Ed. 314 (1922)."

When a person commits a crime against the laws of two different states, then the question of whether the states constitute two different sovereigns or just one is determined by whether the state governments "draw their authority to punish the offender from distinct sources of power." Answering the question, Justice O'Connor wrote that the "powers" of state governments "to undertake criminal prosecutions derive from separate and independent sources of power and authority originally belonging to them before admission to the Union and preserved to them by the Tenth Amendment."

The majority opinion concluded that by violating the laws of two different states, the defendant committed separate offenses against each state; for this reason, the Constitutional prohibition on prosecuting or convicting a person "for the same offense" did not apply, and the Court affirmed the defendant's conviction.

Dissent

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