The U.S. Supreme Court ruled that double jeopardy
doesn’t bar the partial retrial of a corporate president and a Puerto Rican
senator when a jury delivered inconsistent verdicts, but the counts on which
they were convicted were vacated because of incorrect jury instructions, reported the ABA Journal.
The unanimous decision (PDF)
by Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg in Bravo-Fernandez v. United States allows retrial on the federal-program bribery
count for which the two defendants were originally convicted.
The corporate president, Juan Bravo-Fernandez, had been
accused of financing a Las Vegas trip for then Puerto Rican senator Hector
Martinez-Maldonado. Though jurors convicted the men on the bribery count, they
acquitted them on counts of conspiring and traveling to commit the bribery.
Defense lawyers had
argued retrial on the overturned bribery count was barred because the
jury necessarily found that the defendants didn’t violate the bribery statute
when it acquitted them on the related charges of traveling and conspiring to
commit the bribery.
But the Supreme Court said retrial was allowed because the
bribery conviction was vacated for a reason unrelated to the inconsistent
verdicts. The general rule of allowing a new trial to rectify trial error
applies, Ginsburg wrote.
“Because we do not know what the jury would have concluded
had there been no instructional error,” Ginsburg wrote, “new trial on the
counts of conviction is in order.”
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