Double trouble

The U.S. Supreme Court ruled on Monday that if you are convicted in a state court of a criminal offense, the federal government can put you on trial again for essentially the same crime, and if you’re convicted, your new sentence can be added to your old one. In our view, that’s a violation of the Constitution’s prohibition against double jeopardy.

In 2015, Terance Gamble’s vehicle was searched at a traffic stop in Alabama and a gun was found. Gamble, who had a robbery conviction on his record, pleaded guilty to a state charge of being a felon in possession of a firearm, and was sentenced to a year in prison. But he was also charged by the U.S. government for essentially the same crime arising from the same incident.

Writing for the majority, Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr. cited the court’s longstanding view that the federal government and the states are separate “sovereigns” and that “a crime under one sovereign’s laws is not ‘the same offense’

as a crime under the laws of another sovereign.” Alito also emphasized that a ruling in Gamble’s favor would depart from “170 years of precedent.”

The court shouldn’t lightly cast aside precedents. But there were several reasons for the court to do so in this case, as Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Neil M. Gorsuch argued in persuasive dissents that put the focus where it should be: on the injustice of subjecting anyone to two trials for the same crime.

The U.S. Department of Justice has brought federal civil rights prosecutions against defendants acquitted in state court of crimes of violence against racial minorities. But Ginsburg suggested that federal civil rights laws and state laws criminalizing assault are different enough to qualify as separate “offenses.”

The state and federal charges against Gamble were aimed at the same crime and motivated by the same purpose: to punish felons found to be in the possession of a firearm. The court should have ruled that, under the Constitution, one prosecution was enough.