Right. Just being indicted for a crime and being brough to trial is a serious penalty- 10’s of thousands of $ in legal fees, bail, and lost income- not to mention many innocent dudes lose their careers over being arrested.
Let’s say you had a DA that really hated you- maybe cause you were gay, and a member of NAMBLA. But you had never, ever even touched a child (You just thought that the 'age of consent should be 17, not 18, perhaps). Still, the Fundie DA brings charges- you are out say $50,000, and he’s out nothing as the gov’t pays his legal bills. The jury finds you “Not Guilty” as you are. He brings charges again, and again, and again, and again. Damn, look at the McMartin Preschool trials, and how those tin-foil-hatted DA’s ruined several peoples lives forever.
It seems to me to be an exceedingly bad idea to seriously consider major constitutional changes to the right of the accused just because you are unhappy that someone who you thought was guilty was found not guilty. Look, there are always tradeoffs and if it important enough to you to have strong protections for the right of the accused (which I hope it is), I think you have to accept that a result of this is that some guilty people will go free. That’s just the way it works. As someone else alluded to, I think the scarier fact is that, despite how our system is currently configured to protect the accused, we still have seen a lot of cases of people on death row who have been found to be innocent…often because of the efforts of people outside the legal system that was supposed to protect them (e.g., the efforts of a college journalism class, as I recall).
And, of course, the OJ Simpson case was an exceptional one in many ways. First of all, he had an exceptional amount of money to hire the best possible defense. Second of all, it seems that the police showed some very poor judgement in who they assigned to the case and how they dealt with some of the evidence. (I say this on the basis of the admittedly little that I know about the case since I did not really follow the case that closely.)
And, of course, the OJ Simpson case was an exceptional one in many ways. First of all, he had an exceptional amount of money to hire the best possible defense. Second of all, it seems that the police showed some very poor judgment in who they assigned to the case and how they dealt with some of the evidence.
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Third, Judge Ito wasn’t up to it. He let Johnny Cochran make it a circus, and, I think, even allowed that guy to say in his summing up, to say, in effect: “Even if you think he’s guilty, you should let him off as payment for all the injustices to Blacks in our country’s legal history.”
Fourth, the prosecutors were so stupid, they didn’t know that the trial could have been moved to a less volatile venue. They didn’t even check.
Fifth, the jury deliberated (if you can call it that) for just a few hours.
Obviously, this can’t be allowed, but what if there were safeguards around it that would prevent malicious retrials? Require the retrial request to be submitted to the Federal court system for review of the “new and significant” evidence. If those courts review and approve via supermajority, a new trial is granted.
I suspect that a busy Federal court would frown mightily on a prosecutor clogging their docket with a personal vendetta.
In my opinion, the double jeopardy protection is based on the philosophy that it is better to let ten guilty men go free than imprison one innocent man. This is why there are so many measures to allow for appeals as well. Personally, I happen to agree with this philosophy.
But the individual still has to hire lawyers, spend time, has his name dragged through the mud, etc. even if it doesn’t go to trial. It doesn’t cost the prosecutor anything. A determined prosecutor can make your life miserable and you have essentially no recourse.
Yes, it can be useful in some cases, but as Blaster Master said, the philosophy is that things should favor the individual more than the state. If that means guilty people occasionally go free in order that innocent people don’t have their lives ruined, it is worth it.
Without double jeorpardy protection you would get far more marginal inital trials. A DA might take someone to dourt with a poor case, knowing that if it doesn’t work he can still do it again and again. With Double Jeopardy protection the prosecutor needs to be pretty sure of his or her case.
Your unstated assumption appears to be that OJ was guilty, despite the not guilty verdict. And your conclusion based on that assumption is that ergo an attempt should be made to remove a basic protection against repeated trials by the state.
Sounds like a pretty extreme solution to a non-problem
What evidence would there be to retry O.J. if double-jeopardy were not an obstacle? He is saying, “if I had done it,” not “I did it.” And I’m sure that he is speaking and writing hypothetically on advice of counsel. Heinous as it seems, anyone can write a detailed account of murder and pass it off as fiction, even someone tried in criminal court and not found guilty. As long as he does not present it as a confession and say, “I was guilty,” there would no grounds to re-prosecute Simpson.
>The only way double jeopardy can be tossed aside is if evidence is found that the case was rigged
Minor nitpick, but better to say that if the case was rigged then the defendant wasn’t really in jeopardy. He can be tried twice without being in jeopardy twice. It’s not “tossed aside” - rather, it won’t apply until after the second trial.
Once double is allowed ,how about triple. How about the state prosecuting over and over until they get a jury to give the verdict they want. You can’t open that door. Your resources can not match a determined state.
You have not stated any reason to get rid of Double jeopardy. While just saying it is “unconstitutional” is a conclusion and not an argument, as has been stated above, the prohibition against double jeopardy is necessary in order to prevent the state from bleeding an innocent criminal defendant dry but subjecting him to multiple trials for the same offense.