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COURT DECISION

Gamble v. United States
2018

Full name: Gamble v. United States

Click here to read the decision



JUSTICES IN MAJORITY
Samuel Alito
Stephen Breyer
Elena Kagan
Brett Kavanaugh
John G. Roberts
Sonia Sotomayor
Clarence Thomas

DISSENTING
Ruth Bader Ginsburg
Neil Gorsuch

Note: Court justices do not represent any political party. The color of each judge's name represents the political party of the president who appointed the judge.

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Gamble v. US
Gamble v. US decision




What is this case about?

This decision affirmed that a person can be charged at both the federal and state levels for the same crime.

How did this case originate?

Terance Gamble was found with a loaded handgun in his car. Because he was a convicted felon, he committed a crime by having the gun.

Gamble accepted a plea bargain in Alabama. However, the federal government also decided to charge him for the same offense. He accepted a plea bargain in the federal case also.

He then challenged the federal conviction, claiming it violated the double jeopardy clause of the Constitution's Fifth Amendment.

Case challenges 150-year-old precedents

This case pitted two opposing concepts - double jeopardy and dual-sovereignty - against each other.

Court cases as far back as 1852 have set a precedent to allow such prosecutions - because the Constitution provides separate sovereignties for the state and federal governments. It therefore has been reasoned that federal and state offenses are separate offenses.

This allows both a state and the federal government to pursue their individual interests in deciding whether to prosecute an offense.

An alternative argument has been made, however, that the Constitution's protection simply limits prosecutions for the same offense - regardless of competing jurisdictions.

While either theory is arguable, in practice situations such as this rarely come up.

For one reason, the federal government typically does not pursue cases already tried in state courts unless a federal interest deemed important has not been vindicated by the state case. Some states also forbid charging someone with crimes they already have been charged with at the federal level.

For another reason, there often is little or no overlap in the two sets of charges.

Note: The New York Law Journal may require you to create an account (free) with them before you can read the article we link to.

The court will hear the case in December

The court ruled that Gamble's federal conviction was constitutional.

In his majority opinion, Justice Samuel Alito wrote that dual-sovereignty does not violate the Constitution's double jeopardy protection.

"We have long held that a crime under one sovereign's laws is not 'the same offense' as a crime under the laws of another sovereign ... [T]he language of the [double jeopardy] Clause... protects individuals from being twice put in jeopardy 'for the same offence,' not for the same conduct or actions ... So where there are two sovereigns, there are two laws, and two 'offences'. "

Justices of different ideologies offer similar dissent

Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Neil Gorsuch dissented.

"States, unlike foreign nations, are 'kindred systems,' parts of ONE WHOLE ... Within that 'WHOLE,' the Federal and State Governments should be disabled from accomplishing together 'what neither government [could] do alone - prosecute an ordinary citizen twice for the same offence," Ginsburg wrote, adding that sovereignty "resides in the governed."

She noted that those who wrote the Bill of Rights vetoed allowing the federal government to reprosecute a defendant initially tried by a state.

"Most any ordinary speaker of English would say that Mr. Gamble was tried twice for 'the same offence," precisely what the Fifth Amendment prohibits," Gorsuch wrote in his dissent.

The test that the framers of the Constitution intended, Gorsuch wrote, is whether different evidence is required.

"So if two laws demand proof of the same facts to secure a conviction, they constitute a single offense under our Constitution and a second trial is forbidden. And by everyone's admission, that is exactly what we have here," he wrote.

Gorsuch also challenged the core concept of multiple sovereigns. "Under our Constitution, the federal and state governments are but two expressions of a single and sovereign people ... When the [people] assigned different aspects of their sovereign power to the federal and state governments, they sought not to multiply governmental power but to limit it." he wrote.

More information about this case

The Supreme Court agreed to hear this case on June 28, 2018 - the day after Justice Anthony Kennedy resigned.

For more details on the double jeopardy aspects of this case, see the Congressional Research Service report.

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