The federal government prosecuted Merle Denezpi twice for the same crime. It also punished him twice: the first time with 140 days in a federal detention center, the second time with a prison sentence more than 70 times as long.
Although that may seem like an obvious violation of the Fifth Amendment's ban on double jeopardy, the Supreme Court last week ruled that it wasn't. As the six justices in the majority saw it, that puzzling conclusion was the logical result of the Court's counterintuitive precedents on this subject.
