The Earlier Acquittal

A 22-year-old man shot and killed another man in the Choctaw Nation. Two years earlier, in his home state, he had killed a Black man and then moved to the Indian country; before his federal trial he was tried in his home state for that earlier killing and acquitted. At the federal murder trial the prosecution introduced evidence of the earlier killing, and the prosecutor told the jury that such trials in that state were "farces" and that the defendant had come "with his hands stained with the blood" of his earlier victim. The defendant offered evidence explaining the shooting and argued it was not murder, objecting that jurors were being urged to punish him for a crime he had been acquitted of.