Heath v. Alabama

Heath v. Alabama

The cases taught so far involved one state and the federal government, and Heath v. Alabama asked whether the same reasoning holds when both prosecutors are states. The Court held that two different states are separate sovereigns for double jeopardy purposes and may successively prosecute a defendant for the same conduct under their separate criminal laws without violating the Double Jeopardy Clause.¹ The result follows from the source-of-power test, because each state is competent to exercise the residuum of sovereignty that the Constitution did not delegate to the United States, and the states stand as equals in power, dignity, and authority. Neither state's power to punish flows from the other, so a prosecution by one is an exercise of its own sovereignty and never the other's. Two states therefore stand to each other as a state stands to the federal government, and the offence defined by Georgia's law is a different offence from the one defined by Alabama's.

This section takes the case in two parts. The first walks through the facts and the holding in the order the events occurred, so that the reader can see exactly which two prosecutions were at issue and why each state had its own claim to punish the same conduct. The second turns to the argument the Court refused to accept, which would have allowed a second state prosecution only where the two governments had pursued differing interests, and to the dissent's objections to that refusal. The facts come first because the holding makes sense only against the specific conduct that gave two states a basis to prosecute.

Facts and Holding

The facts of Heath v. Alabama matter because they gave two states a real connection to a single killing. In August 1981 Larry Gene Heath hired two men to kill his wife Rebecca, who was nine months pregnant, for $2,000.² On the morning of August 31 he left the family home in Russell County, Alabama, met the men just across the line in Georgia, led them back to the house, handed over the keys to the house and the family car, and left. The men kidnapped Rebecca Heath from her home, and the car holding her body was later found beside a road in Troup County, Georgia, where a gunshot wound to the head was the cause of death. The kidnapping therefore began in Alabama and the killing ended in Georgia, so each state had a plausible claim to punish part of one course of conduct.³

The two prosecutions followed in quick succession. Georgia arrested Heath on September 4, 1981, and he confessed fully. A Troup County grand jury indicted him for malice murder that November, and on February 10, 1982, he pleaded guilty in exchange for a sentence of life imprisonment.⁴ Less than three months later a Russell County, Alabama, grand jury indicted him for the capital offense of murder during a kidnapping. Before trial Heath entered pleas of autrefois convict and former jeopardy, the old common law pleas that the defendant has already been convicted of the offence, arguing that the Georgia conviction barred the Alabama case. He also contested Alabama's jurisdiction on the ground that the crime had occurred in Georgia. The trial court rejected the double jeopardy claims after a hearing and rejected the jurisdictional plea at the close of the State's case. A jury convicted him of murder during a kidnapping in the first degree on January 12, 1983, and both the Alabama Court of Criminal Appeals and the Alabama Supreme Court affirmed. The United States Supreme Court then granted review limited to the double jeopardy question.⁵

Two features of the Supreme Court's handling narrowed what the case decided. First, Heath kept pressing his jurisdictional argument even though review had not been granted on it, and the Court declined to reach it. He had not raised the claim in his petition to the Alabama Supreme Court and first presented it in his petition to the Supreme Court, and the longstanding rule against considering claims not pressed in the state courts creates at least a weighty presumption against review.⁶ The opinion therefore says nothing about whether Alabama had power to try a death that occurred in Georgia. Second, the Court assumed rather than decided that the two offences were the same. Successive prosecutions are barred only if the offences are the same for double jeopardy purposes, and Alabama did not contest Heath's contention that murder during a kidnapping and malice murder could be treated as greater and lesser offences. The Court accordingly assumed that, had both offences arisen under one state's law and been prosecuted in that state, the second conviction would have been barred.⁷ That assumption left a single question: whether the dual sovereignty doctrine permits successive prosecutions under the laws of two different states.

The Court held that it does.⁸ It treated the answer as inescapable once the doctrine is understood as it was first stated and consistently applied. The doctrine rests on the common law view that a crime is an offense against the sovereignty of a government, so a single act that breaks the laws of two sovereigns violates the "peace and dignity" of each and is two offences.⁹ Applied to the facts, malice murder was the breach of Georgia's law, and murder during a kidnapping was the breach of Alabama's law. Each state's power to prosecute comes from its own sovereignty, so the earlier cases that let the federal government and a state each punish the same act apply with equal force to two states. The greater-and-lesser comparison the Court assumed could not carry Heath across that line, because the comparison works only among offences defined by one sovereign's law.

The reason the first state's judgment cannot stand in for the second state's choice can be read off the structure of the rule. Georgia's prosecutor acted on Georgia's interest in a killing that ended in Georgia, and accepted a plea for a life sentence. Alabama had no part in that bargain, and its own law treats murder during a kidnapping from an Alabama home as a capital offense. If the Georgia judgment bound Alabama, one state's plea negotiation would fix the punishment for every other state's separate interest. The state that moved first, or the state most willing to bargain, would set the ceiling for all of them.

The pair isolates the one fact that mattered in Heath: whether a single government's law defines the offence in both prosecutions. The decision also has a narrow practical reach. Two states can prosecute one course of conduct only when each has a jurisdictional claim, and because a state's authority to prosecute is generally tied to territory, such cases are rare.¹⁰ Where they do arise, a conviction or acquittal in one state ordinarily does not bar the other, although a statute may supply a bar and prosecutors may decline to proceed as a matter of discretion.¹¹ Those limits outside the clause are taken up at the end of this chapter.

Interest Balancing Rejected

A defendant who accepts that two states are separate sovereigns can still ask whether the doctrine should have a limit, and the limit proposed in Heath turned on the governments' interests. Under that proposal, a second prosecution by a government with concurrent jurisdiction would go forward only if the second government pursued a different interest from the first and could show that the first prosecution left its own interest unvindicated, meaning unsatisfied. The Court declined to restrict the dual sovereignty principle in that way.¹³ The alternative deserves a fair statement before it is tested against the rule the Court adopted, because it is the strongest argument for a limit on the doctrine, and it is the rejected alternative, not the holding.

The dissenting Justices built their objections on the facts of the case.¹⁴ The first objection concerned interests. In the federal-state pair that first justified the doctrine, the two governments often protect complementary interests: a state punishes the robbery of a bank as a crime within its borders, while the federal government punishes the robbery of a federally insured bank as an injury to a federal concern, so a conviction by one does not necessarily satisfy the other.¹⁵ Georgia and Alabama, the dissenters said, vindicated identical interests in punishing a killing, so Georgia's life sentence had already done what Alabama's capital prosecution claimed to do.¹⁶ The second objection was that successive state prosecutions cannot be defended as the price of dual citizenship. A person who owes obedience to both the nation and a state may be exposed to both governments, but nothing comparable explains exposing that person to two states in turn. The third objection was one of fairness: after Georgia had secured the life sentence it bargained for, Georgia officials testified at the Alabama trial, which the dissent described as collusion between the two states and unfair to the defendant.

The majority answered that sovereignty depends on the source of a government's power to punish, so how far two governments' interests differ has no bearing on whether they are separate sovereigns.¹⁷ That answer follows from what an offence is. The Double Jeopardy Clause bars a second prosecution for the same offence, and, as the opening of this chapter explained, an offence is a breach of the peace and dignity of a particular sovereign. When two separate sovereigns prosecute one act, each is enforcing its own law, so the two prosecutions are for distinct offences and the clause is never triggered.¹⁸ An interest test would add a second inquiry that the definition of an offence does not contain.

The source-of-power rule also has a practical advantage over the alternative. To apply an interest test, a court would have to decide what interest each criminal statute serves and whether the first prosecution fully satisfied it, and those characterizations are hard to make consistently.¹⁹ A court could describe Georgia's murder statute as protecting human life generally or as protecting Georgia's residents and territory, and could describe Alabama's kidnapping-murder statute as punishing the taking of a person from the home or as punishing the killing itself. The choice among those descriptions would then decide a constitutional question. The source-of-power test avoids that problem because it asks a structural question whose answer does not depend on how anyone describes a statute's purpose: where does each government's authority come from? A middle position that would bar a second prosecution unless distinct and substantial governmental interests were shown has been suggested, yet the Court has shown no inclination to adopt it.²⁰

The facts of Heath supply both poles. Georgia and Alabama both punish murder, and neither prosecution left a distinct unvindicated interest, yet the Alabama prosecution was permitted, because interests are not the test.²¹ Under the rejected alternative the result would flip. Alabama would have had to show an interest that Georgia's conviction left unsatisfied, and with the shared interest in punishing the killing already vindicated, the Alabama prosecution would have failed. The Court did not adopt that approach.²²

The cost of the rule is the one the dissent identified: a defendant has no judicial protection against successive prosecutions that pursue the same interest. The concern is addressed elsewhere, since statutes frequently bar a second prosecution in a concurrent jurisdiction situation, and prosecutors may decide not to proceed where another state has already prosecuted.²³ The majority's rule also guards against the opposite danger. A rule that let one government's prosecution bar every other government's would let a lenient first result, such as a plea bargain, cap what any other sovereign could do about the same act, which is the consequence the Court feared in the federal-state cases.²⁴ The last section of this chapter returns to the statutory bars and prosecutorial restraint that do the work the clause leaves undone.

On an exam, a stem that stresses that both states punish the same wrong for the same reason is inviting the interest argument. Students lose this issue when they treat identical interests as making two states one sovereign. The answer traces the source of each state's power to punish, finds two distinct sources, and concludes that the second prosecution is for a different offence.