Forty years after the Blockburger case, the Supreme Court drafted an updated Double Jeopardy test. This test criterion first found application in the Ashe v. Swenson case. Justice Stewart reasoned at the time that “under the majority’s ‘same evidence’ test, when there is a general verdict of acquittal, a court must look at the prior proceedings and conclude whether the jury grounded its verdict upon an issue other than that which the defendant seeks to foreclose from consideration”. To this was added the ‘same transaction’, ‘same conduct’ and ‘same element’ tests in subsequent years to provide for various circumstances of application of the clause (Elizabeth Wiet, 1996). All these modifications have ensured that under unique circumstances, two state trials in two different states for the murder of the same person will not violate the Double Jeopardy Clause of the U.S. Constitution. In the same vein, certain circumstances allow a state trial and a federal trial to be held simultaneously for the murder of the same person without violating the Double Jeopardy Clause of the U.S. Constitution.
References:
Amar, A. R. (1997)., Double Jeopardy Law Made Simple. Yale Law Journal, 106(6), 1807-1848.
Dibianco, G. (1995)., Truly Constitutional? the American Double Jeopardy Clause and Its Australian Analogues. American Criminal Law Review, 33(1), 123-163.
Limbaugh, S. N. (1999)., The Case of Ex Parte Lange. American Criminal Law Review, 36(1), 53.
Rudstein, D. S. (2004)., Double Jeopardy: A Reference Guide to the United States Constitution. Westport, CT: Praeger.
Wiet, E. J. (1996)., Double Jeopardy and the United States Sentencing Guidelines. Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology, 86(4), 1539-1570.