Messy military lawyer. Today’s public service announcement involves double jeopardy. We keep hearing that term tossed around and a lot of comments.
Let’s talk about what double jeopardy means. Double jeopardy means that one, sovereign jurisdiction, if they take action against a citizen, that another sovereign jurisdiction cannot also take action against them for that same matter, same court. Do you know where there’s not double jeopardy when there’s concurrent jurisdiction? Concurrent jurisdiction for military members means multiple jurisdictions can assert control over, you can assert criminal charges over you.
There’s three.
Number one, the military has concurrent jurisdiction over you 24/7/365, no matter where you are on the installation, off the installation.
Number two, independent federal jurisdiction. If it’s done in a place where there is concurrent or exclusive federal jurisdiction, hint, most places on installations are federal jurisdiction…concurrently.
Okay, number three. That’s right. Boys and girls State. There is also concurrent State jurisdiction over you, depending upon where the events have taken place. What does that mean? Did you know that the military can do something to you? The State can do something to you and the Feds can do something to you if they really want to. Do we see it that often? No, we don’t see it that often, but we 100% see it in the history of a very large capital case. I encourage everyone to go look it up, its a capital murder case from the Army where they took a retired E-8, brought him back on active duty and tried him for capital murder. He was tried by the State, he was tried by the Feds, and then he got tried by the military. There’s concurrent jurisdiction, multiple different jurisdictions, and oh, by the way, something administrative like a reprimand or even NJP, does not bar any jurisdiction from taking action against you. And people say, oh, you can’t NJP, like, I can’t get NJ P for a DUI and then the State do something. Wrong! It happens every day.
Now in some, oh, I’m a paralegal, and that’s not what we did. Didn’t say they, doesn’t mean that they can’t, right? Some jurisdictions, some installations will say, okay, if it’s an off duty DUI, it didn’t happen on the base, then we’ll just give a letter of reprimand and then of course the civilians are gonna take care of it and then we’re going to ad-sep the person kick ’em out. That happens also every day. So today’s public service announcement is, I don’t think double jeopardy means what you think it means. So please stop using it. Please stop using it and educate yourself. But please don’t toss around these terms that you don’t know what they mean. Messy military lawyer.
Jocelyn Stewart is a UCMJ court-martial attorney who specializes in defense of allegations of sexual assault for all branches of the military worldwide.
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