Is burgers analogy an accurate one

Reference no: EM133346747

Case: Imagine that you are a Supreme Court Justice. You are considering the 1969 appeal to Bob Fred Ashe--convicted of robbing six men at a private poker party. As Woodward and Armstrong (in The Brethren) describe the case:

Ashe was put on trial for robbing one of the six players and found not guilty. The prosecutors reworked their case, focusing on the witnesses that had been helpful to the prosecution and ignoring those whose testimony was not. Some witnesses' memories improved. The state then tried Ashe for robbing another of the players. This time he was convicted.

The Supreme Court decided to hear the case. The justice wanted to clarify a decision of the previous year against double jeopardy (the doctrine that a person cannot be tried twice for the same offense.) Most of the members of the Court favored freeing Ashe, but Chief Justice Warren Burger thought the conviction should stand. Burger wrote an opinion, to be circulated among the other Justices, that employed a particularly interesting analogy. Woodward and Armstrong described Burger's argument:

This time, Burger decided, he would dissent even if he stood alone. He would write an opinion that spelled out in his most dramatic prose the nature and meaning of the majority's position. The 1966 Chicago slayi8ng of eight student nurses by Richard Speck, one of the most notorious crimes of the decade, provided an interesting parallel. With that example, perhaps the other Justices and the public would understand the implications of providing criminals with such a loophole. The Chief wrote that if the poker robbery was to be viewed hypothetically as akin to [analogous to] a man breaking into a woman's dormitory, as Speck had done, raping and killing eight women, the crimes beyond the first one were effectively "free". In effect, the Court would be encouraging mass murder.

Question: Is Burger's analogy an accurate one? Does it follow from such a ruling that "crimes beyond the first one was effectively 'free'"? How would you rule? Justify your answer.

Reference no: EM133346747

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