Justices
Allow Retrial on Rejected Charges
By ADAM LIPTAK
Published: May 24, 2012
WASHINGTON — The
Supreme Court
ruled
on Thursday that a criminal defendant may be retried even though the
jury in his first trial had unanimously rejected the most serious
charges against him. The vote was 6 to 3, with the justices split over
whether the constitutional protection against double jeopardy barred
such reprosecutions.
The case arose from the death in 2007 of a
1-year-old Arkansas boy, Matthew McFadden Jr., from a head injury he
suffered while at home with his mother’s boyfriend, Alex Blueford. The
prosecution said Mr. Blueford had slammed Matthew into a mattress; Mr.
Blueford said he had accidentally knocked the boy to the floor.
Mr. Blueford was charged under four theories,
in decreasing order of seriousness: capital murder (though the state did
not seek the death penalty), first-degree murder, manslaughter and
negligent homicide.
The jurors were instructed to consider the
most serious charge first and move to the next only if they unanimously
agreed that Mr. Blueford was not guilty. In this way, they were to work
their way down to the appropriate conviction, or to an acquittal.
After a few hours of deliberation, the jurors
announced that they were deadlocked. The forewoman told the judge that
the jury had unanimously agreed that Mr. Blueford was not guilty of
capital or first-degree murder, but she said it was divided, 9 to 3, in
favor of guilt on the manslaughter charge.
The jury deliberated for an additional
half-hour but could not reach a verdict. The court declared a mistrial.
Prosecutors sought to retry Mr. Blueford on
all four charges. His lawyers agreed that he could be retried on the
less serious ones but said double jeopardy principles should preclude
his retrial on the charges of capital murder and first-degree murder.
Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr., writing for
the majority, said Mr. Blueford could be retried on all of the charges
because “the foreperson’s report was not a final resolution of
anything.” When the jurors returned to their deliberations after the
forewoman spoke, he said, they could have changed their minds about the
two more serious charges.
“The fact that deliberations continued after
the report deprives that report of the finality necessary to constitute
an acquittal on the murder offenses,” the chief justice wrote. Justices
Antonin Scalia, Anthony M. Kennedy, Clarence Thomas, Stephen G. Breyer
and Samuel A. Alito Jr. joined the majority opinion.
Mr. Blueford’s lawyers also argued that the
trial judge should not have declared a mistrial without first asking the
jury whether, in the end, the defendant had been found not guilty of
some charges. Chief Justice Roberts said the judge had acted
appropriately, as “the jury’s options in this case were limited to two:
either convict on one of the offenses, or acquit on all.”
In dissent, Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote that
the majority had improperly given prosecutors “the proverbial second
bite at the apple.”
“The forewoman’s announcement in open court
that the jury was ‘unanimous against’ conviction on capital and
first-degree murder,” she wrote, “was an acquittal for double jeopardy
purposes.”
Justice Sotomayor said the trial judge should
have asked for a partial verdict from the jury before declaring a
mistrial. She added that the protections of the Constitution’s double
jeopardy clause were needed in light of “the threat to individual
freedom from reprosecutions that favor states and unfairly rescue them
from weak cases.”
Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Elena Kagan
joined the dissent in the case, Blueford v. Arkansas, No. 10-1320.
©
2012 The New York Times Company
http://www.nytimes.com
|