Expanding Double Jeopardy | David Rittgers | Cato Institute: Commentary

Expanding Double Jeopardy | David Rittgers | Cato Institute: Commentary: "n legal terms, this law achieves its aims through federal authority over interstate commerce. If someone assaults you by throwing a cell phone at you, what Congress has done is enabled the prosecution of the thrower as a function of the fact that the cell phone was made in Japan, and therefore must have crossed state lines."

"An equally striking feature of the law is that the federal power to prosecute is not dissipated even if the defendant is found guilty by the state. It explicitly says, in fact, that federal charges should be pursued if the state verdict 'left demonstratively unvindicated the Federal interest in eradicating bias-motivated violence.'"

"The protection against double jeopardy was put in place to prevent retrying a politically unpopular but evidentially elusive defendant until he was found guilty. Congress apparently sees this as a glitch, rather than a virtue, in the American criminal-justice system.

The power to reprosecute is not one we should grant to any government, much less one with a politicized selection of who will be haled into court. For evidence, look no further than the Duke lacrosse non-rape case a few years ago. If the trial had gone to court and ended in acquittal, would we now be in federal court for a second round? The recent Department of Justice decision not to prosecute members of the New Black Panther Party who engaged in voter intimidation last November illustrates the flip side of this coin. Decisions to prosecute or not based on race undermine the rule of law."