Heath v. Alabama
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''Heath v. Alabama'', 474 U.S. 82 (1985), is a case in which the
United States Supreme Court The Supreme Court of the United States (SCOTUS) is the highest court in the federal judiciary of the United States. It has ultimate appellate jurisdiction over all U.S. federal court cases, and over state court cases that involve a point o ...
ruled that, because of the doctrine of "dual sovereignty" (the concept that the United States and each
state State may refer to: Arts, entertainment, and media Literature * ''State Magazine'', a monthly magazine published by the U.S. Department of State * ''The State'' (newspaper), a daily newspaper in Columbia, South Carolina, United States * ''Our S ...
possess
sovereignty Sovereignty is the defining authority within individual consciousness, social construct, or territory. Sovereignty entails hierarchy within the state, as well as external autonomy for states. In any state, sovereignty is assigned to the perso ...
– a consequence of federalism), the
double jeopardy In jurisprudence, double jeopardy is a procedural defence (primarily in common law jurisdictions) that prevents an accused person from being tried again on the same (or similar) charges following an acquittal or conviction and in rare case ...
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 The federal government of the United States (U.S. federal government or U.S. government) is the national government of the United States, a federal republic located primarily in North America, composed of 50 states, a city within a fed ...
and a state government, or the governments of more than one state, from prosecuting the same individual separately for the same illegal act.


Background

The
Fifth Amendment to the Constitution of the United States The Fifth Amendment (Amendment V) to the United States Constitution addresses criminal procedure and other aspects of the Constitution. It was ratified, along with nine other articles, in 1791 as part of the Bill of Rights. The Fifth Amendme ...
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.U.S. Const. amend. V
.
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 te
amendments to the Constitution
known as th

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 A congress is a formal meeting of the representatives of different countries, constituent states, organizations, trade unions, political parties, or other groups. The term originated in Late Middle English to denote an encounter (meeting of ...
shall make no law . . . ." It was not until the passage of th
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 The Supreme Court of the United States (SCOTUS) is the highest court in the federal judiciary of the United States. It has ultimate appellate jurisdiction over all U.S. federal court cases, and over state court cases that involve a point o ...
have gradually evolved so as to include most
state State may refer to: Arts, entertainment, and media Literature * ''State Magazine'', a monthly magazine published by the U.S. Department of State * ''The State'' (newspaper), a daily newspaper in Columbia, South Carolina, United States * ''Our S ...
actions within the scope of the Bill of Rights. In ''
Benton v. Maryland ''Benton v. Maryland'', 395 U.S. 784 (1969), is a Supreme Court of the United States decision concerning double jeopardy. ''Benton'' ruled that the Double Jeopardy Clause of the Fifth Amendment to the United States Constitution, Fifth Amendment In ...
'', 395 U.S. 784 (1969), the Supreme Court held that the Fifth Amendment prohibition against
double jeopardy In jurisprudence, double jeopardy is a procedural defence (primarily in common law jurisdictions) that prevents an accused person from being tried again on the same (or similar) charges following an acquittal or conviction and in rare case ...
applies to the states. Nevertheless, each
U.S. state In the United States, a state is a constituent political entity, of which there are 50. Bound together in a political union, each state holds governmental jurisdiction over a separate and defined geographic territory where it shares its sove ...
has long been considered to have its own sovereignty, which it shares with the
U.S. federal government The federal government of the United States (U.S. federal government or U.S. government) is the national government of the United States, a federal republic located primarily in North America, composed of 50 states, a city within a fed ...
; thus, the question of whether ''more than one''
state State may refer to: Arts, entertainment, and media Literature * ''State Magazine'', a monthly magazine published by the U.S. Department of State * ''The State'' (newspaper), a daily newspaper in Columbia, South Carolina, United States * ''Our S ...
can punish the same individual for the same set of actions was left open.


Facts and procedural history

In 1981, the defendant, Larry Gene Heath (5 October 1951 – 20 March 1992), traveled from Russell County,
Alabama (We dare defend our rights) , anthem = "Alabama" , image_map = Alabama in United States.svg , seat = Montgomery , LargestCity = Huntsville , LargestCounty = Baldwin County , LargestMetro = Greater Birmingham , area_total_km2 = 135,765 ...
to
Troup County Troup County (pronounced ) is a county located in the west central portion of the U.S. state of Georgia. As of the 2020 census, the population was 69,426.US Census Bureau, 2020 Report, Troup County, Georgia The county seat is LaGrange. Troup ...
,
Georgia Georgia most commonly refers to: * Georgia (country), a country in the Caucasus region of Eurasia * Georgia (U.S. state), a state in the Southeast United States Georgia may also refer to: Places Historical states and entities * Related to the ...
, where he met with two other individuals whom he had hired to kill his pregnant wife Rebecca.''Heath v. Alabama'', 474 U.S. at 83-84. They returned with him to his house and, after he left the scene, they killed his wife in exchange for $2,000. He was arrested later that year and, on 10 February 1982, pled guilty in a
Georgia Georgia most commonly refers to: * Georgia (country), a country in the Caucasus region of Eurasia * Georgia (U.S. state), a state in the Southeast United States Georgia may also refer to: Places Historical states and entities * Related to the ...
court to the crime of murder, and was sentenced to life imprisonment. Subsequently, a grand jury in Alabama, his state of residence,
indict An indictment ( ) is a formal accusation that a person has committed a crime. In jurisdictions that use the concept of felonies, the most serious criminal offence is a felony; jurisdictions that do not use the felonies concept often use that of an ...
ed 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.''Heath'', 474 U.S. at 85. The prosecutor argued, however, that because the defendant's wife had been kidnapped in Alabama, the murder "may be punished" there. On 12 January 1983, a jury in the Alabama court
convicted In law, a conviction is the verdict reached by a court of law finding a defendant guilty of a crime. The opposite of a conviction is an acquittal (that is, "not guilty"). In Scotland, there can also be a verdict of " not proven", which is co ...
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 Affirmed (February 21, 1975 – January 12, 2001) was a champion American Thoroughbred racehorse who is the eleventh winner of the American Triple Crown. Affirmed was well known for his famous rivalry with Alydar, whom he met ten times, includi ...
this decision on direct appeal.''Heath v. State'', 455 So. 2d 898 ( Ala. Crim. App. 1983). The Alabama Supreme Court, after granting ''certiorari'', affirmed the decision of the lower court as well. The
United States Supreme Court The Supreme Court of the United States (SCOTUS) is the highest court in the federal judiciary of the United States. It has ultimate appellate jurisdiction over all U.S. federal court cases, and over state court cases that involve a point o ...
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

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."''Heath'', 474 U.S. at 88. "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.474 U.S. at 94.


Dissent


Justice Marshall's dissent

Justice Marshall, in a minority opinion, sought to distinguish between the long-held principle that the Fifth Amendment does not prohibit the U.S. federal government and the state governments from separately prosecuting the same individual for the same illegal act, and the majority holding that two separate state governments can do likewise. In his dissent, he explains that the "dual sovereignty" exception to the double jeopardy clause was designed specifically "to accommodate complementary state and federal concerns within our system of concurrent territorial jurisdictions."''Heath'', 474 U.S. at 95 (Marshall & Brennan, JJ., dissenting). Furthermore, even if the reasoning of the majority was correct, the dual sovereignty doctrine must "not e used tolegitimate the collusion between Georgia and Alabama in this case to ensure that petitioner is executed for his crime." Specifically, in this case the defendant pleaded guilty in Georgia for the express purpose of avoiding the death penalty; then, he was put on trial in Alabama by a jury in a town where the crime was notorious, and where 75 of 82 prospective jurors were aware that Heath had already pleaded guilty in Georgia. The judge, rather than exclude the jurors who knew that the defendant had already pleaded guilty, simply asked them if they would be able to "put aside their knowledge of the prior guilty plea in order to give petitioner a fair trial in Alabama." It strains credibility that the jurors could remain impartial in spite of their knowledge of the guilty plea.''Heath'', 474 U.S. at 97. Furthermore, given that the jurors had this knowledge, defense counsel "could do little but attempt to elicit information from prosecution witnesses tending to show that the crime was committed exclusively in Georgia"; any argument tending to show actual innocence would likely be disbelieved by the jury, in spite of the fact that the guilty plea in Georgia was part of a plea bargain, and some defendants, to avoid execution, may plead guilty without actually being guilty.Cf. '' North Carolina v. Alford'', 400 U.S. 25 (1970). Justice Marshall also comments that it would, without question, have been unconstitutional if the State of Georgia had decided to re-prosecute Heath on a capital charge because of its dissatisfaction with the life sentence that he had already received. "The only difference between this case and such a hypothetical ''
volte-face Volte-face ( or ) is a total change of position, as in policy or opinion; an about-face. The expression comes from the French language. In the context of politics a volte-face is, in modern English, often referred to as a U-turn or a flip- ...
'' by Georgia is that here Alabama, not Georgia, was offended by the notion that petitioner might not forfeit his life in punishment for his crime. The only reason the Court gives for permitting Alabama to go forward is that Georgia and Alabama are separate sovereigns." He then goes on to criticize the majority for its "restrictive" interpretation of the word "offence." The only reasons why there needs to be a dual-sovereignty exception to the Fifth Amendment prohibition of double jeopardy, argues Marshall, are that
were a prosecution by a State, however zealously pursued, allowed to preclude further prosecution by the Federal Government for the same crime, an entire range of national interests could be frustrated
and that
Conversely, because "the States under our federal system have the principal responsibility for defining and prosecuting crimes," Abbate v. United States, supra, at 195, it would be inappropriate - in the absence of a specific congressional intent to pre-empt state action pursuant to the Supremacy Clause - to allow a federal prosecution to preclude state authorities from vindicating "the historic right and obligation of the States to maintain peace and order within their confines," Bartkus v. Illinois, supra, at 137.
No such "interests" need to be protected when two different states are seeking to prosecute the same offense, and so the underlying reasons behind the "dual-sovereignty" exception to the prohibition against
double jeopardy In jurisprudence, double jeopardy is a procedural defence (primarily in common law jurisdictions) that prevents an accused person from being tried again on the same (or similar) charges following an acquittal or conviction and in rare case ...
do not apply. Indeed, in 1909 the Supreme Court had held that in case of an incident that occurs on territory subject to "'the one first acquiring jurisdiction of the person may prosecute the offense, and its judgment is a finality in both States, so that one convicted or acquitted in the courts of the one State cannot be prosecuted for the same offense in the courts of the other' Nielsen v. Oregon, 212 U.S. 315, 320 (1909)," (The majority decision of the Court stated that the holding of ''Nielsen v. Oregon'' was applicable only to a unique set of circumstances. In ''Nielsen v. Oregon'', two States jointly had jurisdiction over the river that separates them from each other, and one state had prosecuted somebody for an act that was specifically ''permitted'' under the laws of the other, and the Court reversed the conviction.) Finally, Justice Marshall points out that "Even where the power of two sovereigns to pursue separate prosecutions for the same crime has been undisputed, this Court has barred both governments from combining to do what each could not constitutionally do on its own."474 U.S. at 102. In this case, the prosecutions in Alabama and Georgia were so inextricably linked that it was as if they were acting together as a single governmental entity. Furthermore, the interests of justice, according to Marshall, were frustrated by having the defendant plead guilty to a crime in Georgia to avoid the death penalty, only to have the guilty plea prevent him from mounting a meaningful defense to capital charges in Alabama. For these reasons, in the interests "of fundamental fairness," Justice Marshall voted against the majority decision.


Justice Brennan's dissent

Justice Brennan joined Justice Marshall in his dissent, but wrote a separate statement (joined by Justice Marshall), in which he indicated that the "interests" mentioned by Justice Marshall, which would justify allowing Federal and State prosecutions for the same illegal act, are not of a nature that would justify any other exception to the rule that one may not be prosecuted more than once for the same offense.


Subsequent history

The defendant in this case subsequently filed a petition for post-conviction relief in the Alabama state court system, and for a Federal writ of ''
habeas corpus ''Habeas corpus'' (; from Medieval Latin, ) is a recourse in law through which a person can report an unlawful detention or imprisonment to a court and request that the court order the custodian of the person, usually a prison official, t ...
'', both of which were denied;''Heath v. State'', 536 So. 2d 142 (Ala. Crim. App. 1988); ''Heath v. Jones'', 941 F.2d 1126 (11th Cir. 1991) he was
executed Capital punishment, also known as the death penalty, is the state-sanctioned practice of deliberately killing a person as a punishment for an actual or supposed crime, usually following an authorized, rule-governed process to conclude that t ...
on 20 March 1992.


References


External links

*
Full text of the amendments to the Constitution of the United States of America
including the Bill of Rights and the Fourteenth Amendment.

{{Fifth Amendment crimpro, jeopardy, state=expanded Legal history of Alabama Russell County, Alabama Troup County, Georgia United States Double Jeopardy Clause case law United States Supreme Court cases of the Burger Court United States Supreme Court cases 1985 in Alabama 1985 in United States case law