Retrial Violated Double Jeopardy, But Error Does Not Warrant New Trial

State v. Chavarria-Cruz, Minn.S.Ct., 11/20/2013.  A jury acquitted Mr. Chavarria-Cruz of first degree premeditated murder for the benefit of a gang, but found him guilty of the lesser-included offense of second degree intentional murder for the benefit of a gang.  The Supreme Court reversed that conviction and sentence because Mr. Chavarria-Cruz’s right to counsel had been violated.  Read about that here.  On remand, a second grand jury indicted Mr. Chavarria-Cruz on first degree felony murder for the benefit of a gang and second degree intentional murder for the benefit of a gang.  Mr. Chavarria-Cruz moved to dismiss the felony murder charge; he said that this charge violated double jeopardy because of his acquittal of the first degree premeditated murder charge.  The trial court denied that motion and a jury convicted him of both counts.  The trial court imposed sentence on the second degree murder verdict and imposed the same sentence as imposed after the first trial.

Justice G. Barry Anderson agreed that double jeopardy precluded prosecuting Mr. Chavarria-Cruz  with first degree felony murder for the benefit of a gang.  The trial court had said that so long as any punishment from convictions in the second trial did not exceed the punishment imposed in the first trial there were no jeopardy concerns.  Justice Anderson said that this was incorrect because double jeopardy is not limited just to punishment.  Rather, it also concerns itself with multiple prosecutions.  Because the trial court’s analysis was incorrect, the supreme court reversed the denial of Mr. Chavarria-Cruz’s pretrial motion to dismiss the first degree felony murder charge.  In doing so, the court also criticized the state for not simply retrying Mr. Chavarria-Cruz on the remaining second degree murder charge.

Mr. Chavarria-Cruz is not, however, entitled to a new trial.  The test to be applied where there’s been a double jeopardy violation is whether there is a reasonable probability that Mr. Chavarria-Cruz would not have been convicted of the non-jeopardy-barred offense (the second degree intentional murder)  absent the present of the jeopardy-barred offense (the first degree felony murder).  Morris v. Mathews, 475 U.S. 237 (1986).

Justice Page agreed that Mr. Chavarria-Cruz was not entitled to a new trial.  However, he thought that the court’s analysis should have included a statutory analysis in addition to a constitutional one.  He concluded that both Minn.Stat 609.04 and 609.035 precluded a subsequent prosecution for the first degree felony murder charge.  He then applied a harmless error analysis to conclude that this error did not entitle Mr. Chavarria-Cruz to a new trial.

Justice Page also believed that the trial court had convicted and adjudicated Mr. Chavarria-Cruz of both counts, but only sentenced him on the second degree murder court.  That’s exactly what the court had previously said it could not do because it  had no discretion to ignore the mandated life without parole sentence under the first degree murder statute.  State v. Chambers, 589 N.W.2d 466 (Minn. 1999).  Justice Page recently dissented from an identical judicial sleight of hand when the court upheld the very same Mr. Chambers’ juvenile mandatory life without parole sentence, a sentence imposed under a clearly unconstitutional sentencing scheme.  See Miller v. Alabama. Read about that here.