Justices Reject a Double-Jeopardy Claim
The Supreme Court ruled today that the Constitution's bar against double jeopardy does not protect a murder defendant from being sentenced to death in a new trial after the first jury had deadlocked over the sentence.

The 5-to-4 decision came in an appeal by a death-row inmate in Pennsylvania, which like many other states provides that a hung jury in the sentencing phase of a capital murder case results automatically in a life sentence.

Ordinarily, that sentence would be the final word, unless the defendant chooses to appeal the conviction, as David A. Sattazahn did in this case. He won a new trial on appeal, only to find that the state intended once again to seek a death sentence. This time, the prosecution succeeded.

The Pennsylvania Supreme Court upheld the new conviction and death sentence in a 4-to-3 opinion, rejecting Mr. Sattazahn's argument that having once faced a potential death sentence, he should be protected by the double-jeopardy principle from facing it again. The dissenters on the Pennsylvania Supreme Court objected that the result would be to deter meritorious appeals by defendants in Mr. Sattazahn's position.

Death penalty lawyers said today that the decision indeed made such appeals so risky that a defense lawyer could probably not responsibly represent an inmate like Mr. Sattazahn in an appeal of his conviction.

"There is now a class of people basically prevented from appealing their case," Christopher Adams of the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers, said in an interview.

Justice Antonin Scalia wrote the opinion for the court today upholding the Pennsylvania Supreme Court. Under the court's precedents, he said, "the touchstone for double-jeopardy protection in capital-sentencing proceedings is whether there has been an `acquittal.' " Consequently, a life sentence that reflects a jury's choice of that sentence and its rejection of a death sentence cannot be reconsidered in a new trial.

But a jury that has deadlocked has made no findings one way or another, Justice Scalia continued, adding: "That result — or more appropriately, that non-result — cannot fairly be called an acquittal" and so did not bar the state from seeking the death penalty in any retrial.
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/01/15/politics/15SCOT.html