The Supreme Court has for nearly 150 years held that since States and the Federal Government are different, there can be no application of a double jeopardy threat. Each level of government can go for your head independently since they are not the same; there is no deference to a higher level of law that is supreme that trumps a state law and thus subjects the accused to only one trial for the same fruits of the same events.
A recent case that has arisen that really bothers me is the recent Charlottesville, Virginia "hate crimes" State and Federal cases against a stupid Ohio man who claimed to be a White Supremacist and who traveled to Virginia to pick a fight and who eventually took his car and sought to claim as many lives as possible by impersonating a mooslim and ultimately claiming the life of one white female.
Of course the Commonwealth of Virginia sought to punish him for manslaughter and dutifully (and correctly) so charged him; but then the Federal Government sought to reach in and to add charges based on the same crime above and beyond what the Commonwealth had done - to make his actions as "hate crimes" because of what he claimed to be or what was considered to be his intent. It was the very "notion" that the white man traveled to an event where there were going to be hatemongers from the black side of the tracks that made the white man's actions as a hate crime even though those injured were multicultural in makeup (borrowing leftist code language) and the ultimate dead body was of caucasian in ethnicity.
I have long wondered how you can be charged for a death but then get to have different flavors of punishment - do as Virginia did correctly and charge first degree murder ascribing no special protections ascribed to the views and intent of the scumbag honkey - but the Feds took the same event and leveled a multitude of special flavors to make this crime even more special because of his beliefs - an always odd and queer standard since a dead body is a dead body and cannot become more dead because of the beliefs of the murderer. And since these charges by the Federal officials stem from the same chain of events that have already resulted in first degree murder charges by State officials, how is it that the Federal Government can come in and add a special set of punishment based solely on their view of his beliefs?
Explain this to me like I'm a stupid person - both sets of crime charges by the two entities involved looked at the SAME CRIME and SAME CHAIN OF EVENTS but decided to charge differently without one being superior for the events? How is it that the Federal Government gets to seek a rather repugnant view that crimes can have hate and therefore charge a higher punishment when the injuries don't change, the death doesn't become more dead, and the outcome of crime doesn't change? Every crime committed by a person is predicated on his beliefs of how easy his prey is, how likely he's going to evade capture, and a set of assumptions on the event - whether premeditated or not. Just because your victim has been classified as protected on an arbitrary basis does not make the crime different - what difference does driving a car into a crowd of people make if the driver is mooslim or is a white supremacist or if he was a recent college graduate who wore the chip on his shoulder that he wasn't an honor grad? The vehicle hasn't changed - the speed hasn't changed - the crowd is the same - the events are all the same. Yet we somehow have the audacity to punish a commission of a crime because the perp isn't a protected class and some of the people at the event were?
Right now the Supreme Court is considering a different case that is more spot on with double jeopardy than my rant, but the fact remains we need to throw out all protected classifications and hate crimes and charge the event as it happened without regard to adding a special insult to the punishment because the victim happened to be gay or black or a female.
Read about the Supreme Court reconsideration of Double Jeopardy here.
And remember I am a gay man - a libertarian - who finds all hate crime laws and special classes of victims to be violative of equal protection provisions of the Constitution. A crime against me because the perp thinks I'm white or gay or both should not trigger anything other than the charge of assault without the added flavor of giving it to the perp more of a sentence because he thought I was a fag or because he is a militant black social justice warrior.
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