COFFEE MUGS, DOUBLE JEOPARDY, THE HIRING PROCESS, AND ARREST WARRANTS - 024

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TRANSCRIPT:

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​This week on the Writer's Detective Bureau, coffee mugs, double jeopardy, the hiring process and arrest warrants. I'm Adam Richardson and this is the Writer's Detective Bureau.

This is episode number 24 of the Writer's Detective Bureau, the podcast dedicated to helping authors and screenwriters write professional quality crime related fiction. If you have your own author business, consider joining Patreon. It's free for you and it allows your readers to support you financially through monthly micro-payments. Give your fans a chance to show their support by creating your own Patreon account right now. To learn more, visit WritersDetective.com/patreon.

Please join me in thanking the patrons that make this podcast possible: Joan Raymond, Guy Alton, Natasha Bajema, Natalie Barelli, Joe Trent, Siobhan Pope, Leah Cutter, Ryan Kinmil, Richard Phillips, and Robin Lyons by visiting the links to their author websites in the show notes by going to WritersDetective.com/24.

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Last week we talked about dual sovereignty and if you haven't listened to episode 23, just to catch you up, the concept of dual sovereignty is that you can be charged in both a federal court and state court for committing the same criminal act.

In that example, last week it was if you rob a bank, you can be prosecuted in federal court for the crime of bank robbery and you can also be charged in state court under the state's criminal or penal code for the crime of robbery. Now, if you're exonerated in one, meaning that you're found not guilty in, say, federal court, you can still be prosecuted in the other so you can still be prosecuted for that robbery in state court, and that led us to the topic of double jeopardy. Now double jeopardy is different and it is spelled out in the fifth amendment to the US constitution, which prohibits anyone from being prosecuted twice for substantially the same crime. What this means is that if you have gone all the way to ... Now, barring that the crime is both a federal crime and a state crime. Once your court case has attached jeopardy, meaning you will potentially be facing penalty, then you can not be prosecuted a second time for that crime.

So normally this happens when the case has been brought to a jury. And by that I mean the jury is now in deliberation. So if the jury decides that the defendant is not guilty, the prosecutor cannot file a new charge to try this case again. To use the OJ Simpson case as an example, once he was found not guilty for murder, even if new evidence came to light, you know, several decades later, the fact that he's already been found not guilty means that he will not face those charges again. The reason I mentioned double jeopardy is because it could actually be a great plot device or a progressive complication for a story that you're telling...                                                                                              Continue reading...