Fair enough, but if you commit a federal crime, surrender to a federal agent, and confess to the federal crime, are the feds likely to hand you over to the locals right away? Might they tell the local cops “sorry guys, he’s ours but you can have him after he does 5-10 in federal prison for counterfiting” ? Its an honest question, I do not know how these things work.
IANAL or a cop, but it would seem to me that killing law enforcement officers would outrank stealing stamps on the Great Scale of Importance.
That’s actually what I’m curious about. It has to have come up from time to time that multiple jurisdictions have a claim over a single suspect.
In those scenarios does the defendent get handed over to the jurisdiction with the most serious charges pressing, or is it finder’s keepers? Would the feds ever say “he commited federal crimes and he surrendered to us so he’s ours until we’re done with him” ?
What if it wasn’t even long term? Could our hypothetical cop killer muddy the waters well enough so that the feds keep him for a month while they sort it out and let the tempers cool a little ?
It depends, but yes, a suspected cop killer (or murder of any kind) would be handed over to the local police unless the Federal crime was equally nasty or the Feds has some other reason (such as national security) to hold on to them. It’s pretty much common sense rules. Postal fraud would not take precedence over killing a cop.
Remember in the sniper case around DC some years ago? They tried them first in the jurisdiction that was easiest to get the death penalty for both men. The various agencies got together and shopped around. I’m sure there were federal crimes (crossing state lines) they could have (and maybe eventually did) charge them with.
Anything is possible, but there would have to be something fairly serious to hold things up if the crime was capitol murder.
And let’s not forget that a captiol murder charge would be quite the stretch in the scenario posed by the OP. Things would be mighty fucked up in that case.
Since we’re GQ on this one, has there ever been such a scenario before? Someone kills a cop thinking it’s a home invasion or whatever when they knocked down the wrong door?
Cory Maye is a famous recent case presenting precisely this scenario. And yes, he was initially sentenced to death.