Posted on 05/29/2014 8:05:11 AM PDT by Bratch
The USSC violated the 5th by claiming silence can be used against a person.
If the Constitution is a technicality then yes.
The rule of law in restraining ever increasing government power prevailed.
I was merely pointing out the difference between a jury trial and a trial by judge. My post was in reply to a poster who said a judge verdict could not be appealed.
that stood out to me too! rigid, mechanical rules are exactly what should determine whether the Double Jeopardy Clause is violated or not... can you imagine? sheesh!
WOW! In the legal world, it does not get to be more of a bitch slap than that!
The only thing that I can think of that would have been worse would be for the court to unanimously overturn the ruling “with prejudice”.
seriously? did you read the entire article? can you imagine the leeway courts would have here in every trial? the Founding Fathers were exactly right...
bump
The fifth amendment is a technicality? Who knew?
Illinois prosecutors have a well established history of withholding exculpatory evidence, suborning perjury, falsifying evidence, etc., and get away with it because the state and county judges are part of the same political machine and view the prosecutors as “partners.”
I don’t know what the back-story is here. But this case must have had presented a very peculiar situation for the prosecutors to proceed as they did. Why did they empanel a jury? There’s a reason. We just don’t know what it is.
Not saying that it happened in this case, but I’ve seen Chicago prosecutors “throw” cases, for political purposes.
So we should let prosecutors decide to have a second trial whenever they don’t like the verdict from the jury of first trial?
You may have missed it, but that is exactly why the double jeopardy clause was put into our Constitution in the first place.
The prosecutor could have dropped the charges until he found the witnesses, rather than dragging the accused through 4 years of delay and legal expenses and a pointless trial.
Instead he engaged in misconduct or lackadaisical effort and screwed the entire case up and then begged the appeals court to give him another swing at the pinata.
The Supreme Court was right to b!tch slap the Illinois court for endorsing banana republic style prosecutions.
Which is incorrect. When the court empanelled a jury and came to a verdict in the absence of an objection from the prosecutor then the prosecutor made a defacto long-shot bet and lost. A trial occured and a verdict was rendered. Game over.
No, not "whenever" - when there was no meaningful jeopardy.
The prosecutor could have dropped the charges until he found the witnesses, rather than dragging the accused through 4 years of delay and legal expenses and a pointless trial.
Agree 100% - I'm surprised the right to a speedy trial didn't come up.
The fact that they (twice) referenced a trial invalidates this entire statement. They seated a jury. Once a jury is sworn in, jeopardy is attached. Period.
It doesn't matter if the prosecution was on vacation in the Bahamas or if the defendant wasn't present, if a jury is seated, the trial is in session.
We are a “nation of laws, not of men,” but anymore, the converse is true.
Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity. - Hanlon’s Razor
So you want to trade a non-subjective "mechanical" standard of an empaneled jury for determining jeopardy for the mushy and subjective standard of "meaningful"? Who gets to decide what is "meaningful"?
Lawyers, prosecutors and judges, endlessly litigating what the meaning of is is.
Which will ensure more appeals, more trials and more legal bills for the citizens, while the government slowly grinds its targets into fine powder.
No - all I said was they had a point. I agree that there is great value in a clear and unambiguous standard.
An unconstitutional, banana republic point, which is no point at all, but an attempt to undermine our rights by negating the Constitution by setting an illegitimate legal precedent with novel and corrupt reasoning.
I'm very glad that SCOTUS did not decide to ignore it.
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