Court Opinion

ID: 9842039
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-09-22 20:12:28.094647+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T09:09:14.113613
License: Public Domain

Justice Stevens,
dissenting.
While I join Justice Brennan’s dissent, I also note that . neither today nor in its opinion in North Carolina v. Pearce, *153395 U. S. 711 (1969), has the Court adequately responded to Justice Harlan’s powerful analysis of the double jeopardy issue in that case. Id., at 744-751 (concurring in part and dissenting in part). Its purported response in Pearce — that although the rationale for allowing a more severe punishment after a retrial “has been variously verbalized, it rests ultimately upon the premise that the original conviction has, at the defendant’s behest, been wholly nullified,” id., at 720-721 — clearly has no application to the question whether a more severe sentence may be imposed at the prosecutor’s behest when the original conviction has not been nullified.
The straightforward analysis by Justice Harlan is worthy of emphasis:
“Every consideration enunciated by the Court in support of the decision in Green [v. United States, 355 U. S. 184 (1957)] applies with equal force to the situation at bar. In each instance, the defendant was once subjected to the risk of receiving a maximum punishment, but it was determined by legal process that he should receive only a specified punishment less than the maximum. See id., at 190. And the concept or fiction of an ‘implicit acquittal’ of the greater offense, ibid., applies equally to the greater sentence: in each case it was determined at the former trial that the defendant or his offense was of a certain limited degree of ‘badness’ or gravity only, and therefore merited only a certain limited punishment. . . .
“If, as a matter of policy and practicality, the imposition of an increased sentence on retrial has the same consequences whether effected in the guise of an increase in the degree of offense or an augmentation of punishment, what other factors render one route forbidden and the other permissible under the Double Jeopardy Clause? It cannot be that the provision does not comprehend ‘sentences’ — as distinguished from ‘offenses’ — for it has long been established that once a prisoner commences service of sentence, the Clause prevents a court from *154vacating the sentence and then imposing a greater one. See United States v. Benz, 282 U. S. 304, 306-307 (1931); Ex parte Lange, 18 Wall. 163, 168, 173 (1874).” Id., at 746-747.
The Court’s response to this analysis is nothing more than a rather wooden extrapolation from a rationale that, however it may be "variously verbalized,” id., at 720-721, is wholly irrelevant, to the important question presented by this case.
Because I agree with what Justice Brennan has written today as well as with what Justice Harlan wrote in 1969, I respectfully dissent.