Say a person disappears under suspicious circumstances. Their body is never found, nor is forensic evidence that shows they died found. They just can’t be located and it was your wife or something and you were seen arguing before the disappearance or some other cliche.
You accept a plea bargain for the murder charge of 5 years. (this is basically exactly what could have happened in a real case) You know you are innocent but don’t want to risk a life sentence.
5 years later, you get out, and you track down the person you allegedly murdered.
Say the person you allegedly killed was “Jane Doe”. So you already have a conviction on your record for the murder of “Jane Doe”. If the state charges you with the murder of Jane Doe, again, and it’s the same state as before, wouldn’t this be double jeopardy?
Technically speaking, you can’t be convicted of the same crime twice, which means you cannot be convicted of murdering the same person the second time.
However, I wouldn’t count on that as a real defense. If the first crime was charged under state law, the feds might have a go at you. Or maybe they don’t charge you with murder but with manslaughter the second time. Or how about reckless endangerment because of firing a gun in the general direction of a person? And since this is now your second felony, they’ll be much less lenient, I’m sure.
No. Sorry. Once again, these are two separate murders. The first was a wrongful conviction of a murder that never happened. The second was a murder. The next semantic game you try will be wrong too.
I am not a lawyer, but I always understood it to be a different murder. Your conviction is for killing Jane Doe on or about June 5, 2010. You actually killing Jane Doe on April 5, 2015 is a different murder.
If you were incorrectly found guilty of holding up the 7-11 on October 13th, 1997, that does not mean that you are allowed to hold it up next Tuesday, even if you already served a sentence on the wrongful conviction.
IANAL, but I would argue that if you were charged with murder and pled a possible life sentence down to a 5 year sentence, you weren’t convicted of a “murder” charge. Six years later, if you actually did murder that person, it would be a different crime. Similar to what hajario and raventhief posted.
No death, no murder. The first conviction would be nullified upon evidence the supposed victim was still alive during the conviction, and you might even receive a pardon. So if you killed him upon your release, as others have said, that’s a different crime.
Disclaimer: Everything I know about the law I learned from watching Perry Mason.
I mean the 5 years. He was given the option to skip the trial and take the 5 years. At that point they hadn’t found the body. During the trial phase, they never presented anything definitive - suspicious activity but no smoking gun. Had he not taken the stand he might have been acquitted.
I ain’t saying he didn’t do it, I know he did, I’m saying that if (1) Hans had made the smart decision and taken the 5 year plea deal and (2) Hans happened to have actually been innocent of the crime, the situation I outlined above would have been the one in question.
No. That was the premise of the film called (surprise!) Double Jeopardy, but it’s not true.
You can’t be convicted twice for the same crime, but the two murders are distinct crimes, even if one never happened. The first time, you’re charged with the murder of Jane Doe on or around 25 November 2010. The second time, you’re charged with the murder of Jane Doe on or around 25 November 2015. You would get a pardon and possibly compensation for your imprisonment for the first ‘murder’, and then you’d get charged wth the ‘second’ murder.
ETA: If it helps, think of it with a different crime. You’re tried and convicted for robbing a petrol station, which you didn’t do. After you get out, you rob the petrol station. They’re not going to say, ‘Ah, sure, forget about it, you were owed a freebie.’
Well, there goes my plan for fame and fortune. I’m glad I found this out before I got that “Born to Lose” tattoo on my chest.
Hey, my man Tommy Lee Jones has bills to pay. Do you know how much it costs to keep a cattle ranch going these days? He doesn’t have time to question the basic legal plausibility of a mid-'Nineties thriller, most of which made less sense than The Big Sleep, or for that matter, The Big Lebowski. Still not as bad as going over to Japan and make a series of commercials for Boss Coffee in an unironic copy of Bill Murray’s character in Lost In Translation.
It’s rare enough to be convicted of homicide without a body.
The bar for conviction is obviously set high in such a case.
In spite of killers claiming their victim just disappeared (or set them up by disappearing), I’ve never heard of an actual case where someone was convicted of murder and the victim turned up laughing years later.
This isn’t true - while you can’t be convicted for the same crime twice, a single crime involves one set of facts. A murder on a different day and with different circumstances is a distinct crime, even if the alleged victim is the same. Even though it doesn’t logically make sense in a way (as someone only dies once), legally murder works like stealing a car, and you can certainly be convicted for stealing the same car a second time, even if the other facts are the same.
Other than the federal part, this isn’t true. If double jeopardy has attached, then the fifth amendment protects you from any charge crime based on the facts of the crime that jeopardy has attached to. If someone is convicted/acquited of murder, the prosecutor can’t go back and try them for manslaughter or littering for the same set of facts. Federal criminal conviction is possible, but there isn’t a general federal murder statute, and the feds generally only step in if the case has some kind of federal implication or they think that state authorities are corrupt in some way, so it’s pretty unlikely.
Habeed, that doesn’t seem to be the issue in the Reiser case. The guy WAS guilty.
Could a defense attourney try and argue that the years you spent in prison for a crime you didn’t commit should count towards any sentence you might end up serving for the crime you DID commit? Not as in, “well, my client already served his sentence so you can’t convict him again!” But, “I believe my client’s time spent incarcerated for a crime he was innocent of should be considered when it comes to sentencing.”
Not to get the client off, but perhaps to say, get a reduced sentence. (Not that I think it would work – just would it be worth trying?)
Okay, how about what happens to an alleged victim? In the Reiser case for example let’s say Nina did somehow make it really look like she was murdered, only instead she went back to Russia, and Hans was convicted. Let’s say he never made the deal where he would say where she was buried because he didn’t do it, so he couldn’t. So he spends 10 years in prison and then, surprise, Nina is found to be alive and living in Russia with their children.
I know that Hans would probably eventually get a pardon for the original conviction. And he couldn’t go back and kill her and get away with time served (although by this point he would probably want to kill her even more).
Nothing. It isn’t a crime to disappear. And it wouldn’t have been Nina’s fault the state used her disappearance as an excuse to wrongfully imprison an innocent individual. And the cops, prosecutors, judges, and jurors who made the wrongful imprisonment possible get to claim immunity as well. Basically, the innocent defendant is left holding the bag. If he’s lucky and sympathetic and in the right state he might get a small amount of money for being imprisoned as compensation.
Basically, the only way the innocent defendant is going to get justice is if he gets a gun and goes on a shooting spree, mowing down all the dozens of people who wronged him. Huh.
I wonder if, using the OP’s logic, you were accused of attempted murder and found guilty would you be able, after completing your sentence, to continue to attempt to murder the victim. Providing of course that you didn’t actually succeed (or should that be fail) in murdering him. Could you do it every day for the rest of your life?
I believe this would have made a far better movie than Double Jeopardy turned out to be. Kind of like Groundhog Day with violence.