For most of the history of English-speaking criminal law, a verdict of not guilty ended the matter. The rule against double jeopardy says that a person who has been tried for an offense and acquitted cannot be tried for it again, however much evidence appears afterward, however certain the police may become, however many years pass. The rule protects every defendant against a state that can bring unlimited resources to bear and try as often as it likes until it wins. It also protects the guilty. In serial cases, where the same name keeps appearing across decades and across jurisdictions, the rule has produced some of the most uncomfortable outcomes in modern criminal justice.
Two reforms in the British Isles have cut into it. In England and Wales, the Criminal Justice Act 2003 allowed a prosecution for a list of grave offenses, murder first among them, to be revived where new and compelling evidence emerges, with the Court of Appeal deciding whether the acquittal should be quashed. In Scotland, the Double Jeopardy (Scotland) Act 2011 went through Parliament after one acquittal in particular, and the first man retried under it was a serial offender. Of the cases below, only one was tried under a reform of the rule. The others show how the old rule still operates in serial cases, in the United States above all, and where its edges lie: an acquittal that can never be reopened, a case dismissed on double jeopardy grounds, a retrial after a prosecutor’s misconduct, a jury’s refusal of a death sentence in one case argued to bar a death sentence in four more, a life verdict form that a defense lawyer wanted preserved, and a failed execution that a lawyer argued could not be repeated.
On the night of Saturday, October 15, 1977, Christine Eadie and Helen Scott, both 17, ended an evening out in Edinburgh at the World’s End pub on the Royal Mile. They left with two men. Their deaths came to light in East Lothian the next day. For almost 30 years no one was charged. When a man did stand trial in 2007, the judge stopped the case at the end of the prosecution evidence and acquitted him.
That man was Angus Robertson Sinclair, born in Glasgow in 1945, the youngest of three children. As a teenager he had pleaded to culpable homicide in the death of a seven-year-old girl, Catherine Reehill, in Glasgow in 1961, and had been sentenced to ten years' detention. In 1982 he was convicted of offenses against children and sentenced to life. In 2001 a jury at the High Court in Glasgow convicted him of the 1978 murder of another 17-year-old, Mary Gallacher. DNA work on a hair had linked him to that case, the Scotsman reported, and the sentence was a second life term with a punishment part of 15 years. The judge at that trial was Lord Carloway, who later sat on the appeal bench that decided whether Sinclair could be tried again, and who declined to step aside when Sinclair asked him to.
Sinclair appeared on petition for the World’s End murders on March 31, 2005, while still in prison. His trial opened in 2007. At the close of the Crown case the defense made a submission of no case to answer, and Lord Clarke, after considering it over a weekend, upheld it on September 10, 2007. The jury never retired. "There was no forensic evidence to link the accused to the items used to kill the girls," the judge said, and he was not satisfied that the evidence the Crown relied on could overcome "that absence of crucial evidence." The Crown Office noted that Scots law gave no right of appeal against an acquittal by a judge.
The reaction was immediate. Lothian and Borders Police said they were disappointed, and the chief constable, Tom Wood, said he was bitterly disappointed for the families. An independent member of the Scottish Parliament, Margo MacDonald, observed that only about a fifth of the Crown’s evidence had been led and asked whether there would be an inquiry. With the trial over, the Lord Advocate, Elish Angiolini, made a statement to Parliament in which she said that had the Crown possessed a right of appeal against a ruling of no case to answer, she would have used it. The statement set out the Crown’s view that the judge had been wrong, and it led to a public dispute with Scotland’s senior judge, the Lord President, Lord Hamilton, over whether the case should have gone to the jury. On September 24, 2007, the Scotsman called Lord Clarke’s reasoning careful and coherent while defending the Lord Advocate’s right to say it was mistaken; it added that even a successful reference to the appeal court would leave the acquittal where it was. The Journal of the Law Society of Scotland printed a contrary view, cautioning against rewriting the law in reaction to a single case.
Parliament rewrote it anyway. The Double Jeopardy (Scotland) Act 2011 came into force in November 2011. Among other grounds, section 4 allows the High Court to set aside an acquittal where new evidence has emerged. The test has three limbs. The evidence must not have been available at the first trial, and could not have been with reasonable diligence. It must substantially strengthen the case against the accused. And it must be highly likely that a reasonable jury, properly directed, would have convicted on the new evidence together with the old. The justice secretary, Kenny MacAskill, referred to the World’s End case when the Act took effect.
In March 2012 the Crown Office asked police to reinvestigate. By December 2012 the Lord Advocate had applied to the High Court to set aside Sinclair’s acquittal, the first application of its kind. The new evidence came largely from DNA work done by the forensic company Cellmark in 2011 and 2012, using a light source called Crime-Lite that can show where material has been deposited on a garment. It was the first use of the technique in a Scottish criminal case. The work produced a full DNA profile of Sinclair on items of the girls' clothing, which at the first trial the judge had treated as neutral on whether he took part in the violence. The Crown argued that it no longer was. "Without Crime-Lite, there would have been no trial two," the Lord Advocate who prosecuted the retrial, Frank Mulholland, said afterward, and the senior detective on the reinvestigation compared the findings to "a smoking gun."
On March 27, 2014, three judges of the High Court, Lord Justice Clerk Carloway, Lady Dorrian and Lord Bracadale, granted the application. They held that the new evidence substantially strengthened the case and that a properly instructed jury would very probably convict. They rejected defense arguments that a second trial could use only the evidence led in 2007 plus the new material, and that publicity made a fair trial impossible, noting that most of the coverage was old and that the trial need not be held in Edinburgh. The court also held that the Crown had acted promptly, that the crimes were very serious, and that a new trial was in the interests of justice.
The retrial opened on October 13, 2014, at the High Court sitting in Livingston, before Lord Matthews. Sinclair, 69, pleaded not guilty. He lodged special defenses, incrimination of a second man and alibi, saying through a defense report read to the jury that the girls were alive when he left them. The jury convicted him on November 14, 2014, of the murder of both 17-year-olds, with other charges. Lord Matthews set a punishment part of 37 years, the longest a Scottish court had imposed.
The legal sequels were short. Sinclair was granted legal aid to appeal; the Scotsman reported in May 2015 that the first trial had cost 530,932 pounds in legal aid, with a further 108,592 pounds paid to his solicitors for opposing the Crown’s application. In August 2015 he dropped his challenge to the conviction. Scottish Legal News noted that the appeal might have tested how the new double jeopardy law worked in practice, and so the first conviction under the Act was never examined on appeal. The challenge to sentence went ahead before Lady Paton, Lady Clark of Calton and Lord Malcolm. The defense argued that 37 years was excessive because it appeared to mirror the 37 years since the murders, that the judge had not looked at comparable cases, and that convictions for crimes committed after 1977 should not have counted against him. The court refused the appeal on March 24, 2016. Sinclair died in HMP Glenochil on March 11, 2019, aged 73, and a fatal accident inquiry at Stirling Sheriff Court made no criticism of his care. He never admitted the crimes.
A 2004 police review had linked Sinclair to four other deaths in Glasgow in 1977. He was never charged with them, and another man was convicted in one of those cases. The review is why press coverage of his death used the phrase "serial killer," but the legal record is the one set out above: three convictions for homicide, one of them by a jury after an acquittal had been set aside.
Sharon Kinne went on trial four times in Missouri, once over the death of another man’s wife and three times over the death of her husband, and was left with no conviction there. In June 1961 a jury acquitted her of the murder of Patricia Jones, and the Associated Press reported that spectators in the courtroom applauded. In January 1962 a second jury convicted her of the murder of her husband, James Kinne, and she received a life sentence. The Missouri Supreme Court reversed that verdict in 1963. The retrials that followed produced no verdict: according to the Taber Times, drawing on the sheriff’s office chronology, the second ended in a mistrial, and a third, in July 1964, ended with a jury deadlocked seven to five. She was free on bond, with a fourth trial set for October 1964, when she went to Mexico City.
In September 1964 a man from Chicago whom she had met in a bar died in Mexico City, and she was convicted of the killing in October 1965. She was sentenced to 13 years. She escaped from a women’s prison on December 7, 1969, married in Los Angeles in 1970, and from 1973 lived in Taber, Alberta, as Diedra "Dee" Glabus. In 2025 the Kansas City, Missouri, Police Department and the Jackson County Sheriff’s Office announced that she had died there of natural causes on January 21, 2022, at 81, after an anonymous tip, a funeral director’s fingerprint record and an FBI comparison confirmed who she was.
Her case matters here because of what the 1961 acquittal did. Investigators came to believe that evidence gathered in Mexico City tied her to the death of Patricia Jones. It arrived three years too late. The verdict was final, and under the protection against double jeopardy she could not be tried again for that death, whatever came to light. Prosecutors closed the file, the Associated Press reported. The charge in her husband’s case was different, a case that had never reached a final verdict, and it sat on the books until January 2025, when it was dismissed after her death.
The police in 2025 called her a "fugitive serial killer," and a sheriff’s captain said that by definition she was "technically a serial killer." Those are the conclusions of investigators. They are not court findings for the two Missouri deaths: the acquittal in the Jones case stands, and the husband’s case ended without a final verdict. Courts decided three things about Sharon Kinne. A Missouri jury acquitted her in 1961. A Missouri jury convicted her in 1962 and the state Supreme Court reversed in 1963. A Mexican court convicted her of the 1964 killing. The old rule, applied as written, left the record narrower than the police believed, and nothing Missouri or Mexico later learned could widen it.
Between 1967 and 1971, five young women died in Stamford, Connecticut. In March 1972, the police arrested Benjamin F. Miller Jr., a postal worker who called himself an ordained minister and preached in the city. Miller had confessed while involuntarily committed at Fairfield Hills State Hospital, and he soon took the confessions back. On May 15, 1972, he was indicted on five counts of murder. Two counts were dropped in January 1973. In that month, with the prosecutor and the public defender asking for the same result, a panel of three judges found him not guilty by reason of insanity on the other three, and in March 1973 committed him to the custody of the Connecticut Commissioner of Mental Health for up to 25 years.
Connecticut law at the time required the trier of fact to be satisfied beyond a reasonable doubt that the defendant had committed the acts before a verdict of not guilty by reason of insanity could be entered. Commitment then followed a separate hearing, at which the panel concluded by a preponderance of the evidence that Miller was mentally ill and dangerous. A federal court later noted that a person acquitted outright could have been committed only on clear and convincing proof of dangerousness, a standard Connecticut later wrote into its statutes. By the time of his federal case, the official responsible for holding him was the director of the Whiting Forensic Institute.
In 1988 the Second Circuit ordered him released or retried, in a ruling issued on May 20. The National Registry of Exonerations summarizes the case as one in which prosecutors withheld evidence pointing to another man. The State of Connecticut petitioned the U.S. Supreme Court, which denied review on October 11, 1988. Connecticut did not retry him. On May 8, 1989, according to the registry, a judge dismissed the case on double jeopardy grounds, and Miller was released. He went straight into a mental institution of his own accord; his lawyer said his long confinement had left him unable to live on his own.
The registry lists the case as an exoneration in 1989. Its summary, written by Maurice Possley and posted in December 2012, names false confession, false or misleading forensic evidence, official misconduct and inadequate legal defense as the factors that contributed to the outcome, and records that DNA evidence played no part. Miller was never convicted of any of the deaths. Whether he is a serial offender in any sense is a question no court has answered against him.
Marshall Lee Gore, a Miami man with a record of firearm and theft offenses, was convicted of murdering two women he met within about six weeks of each other in the winter of 1988, Susan Roark and Robyn Novick, 30. A third woman, who survived, testified against him. FBI agents arrested him in Paducah, Kentucky, on March 17, 1988, on an unrelated federal charge.
He was tried for Roark’s death first, in Columbia County, and convicted of first-degree murder, kidnapping and armed robbery on March 14, 1990. On April 3, 1990, Judge E. Vernon Douglas sentenced him to death, life and 15 years. The Florida Supreme Court affirmed in 1992. The judge had described him as rational and of "above average intelligence," and in rejecting his youth as mitigation had noted that he was worldly and had completed two years of high school. The Supreme Court identified one error, that the evidence did not prove the killing cold, calculated and premeditated; with three valid aggravating circumstances left and an 11 to 1 jury recommendation, it held the error harmless.
The Novick case in Dade County went differently. He was convicted of first-degree murder and armed robbery in 1995 and sentenced to death on June 30 of that year. On October 1, 1998, the Florida Supreme Court reversed. The prosecutor had questioned Gore about what happened to the survivor’s child without first asking the judge’s permission, in "blatant disregard" of a pretrial ruling. He had also questioned Gore, without proper basis, about an uncharged incident and about another woman. In closing he told jurors, "[i]f you believe he’s lying to you, he’s guilty," which the court held misstated the burden of proof. He gave his personal opinion of Gore’s guilt, traded insults with him and used needless sarcasm. The court said the prosecutor had "abandoned any semblance of professionalism" and called his performance "a 'textbook' example of overzealous advocacy." Because the case was circumstantial, with no physical evidence directly linking Gore to the killing and no confession, the court could not say the errors were harmless.
Gore argued that double jeopardy now barred a retrial. The argument has force in some jurisdictions when misconduct forces a mistrial, and it failed here for two reasons the Florida Supreme Court later set out. A retrial after misconduct is barred only when the misconduct was meant to goad the defendant into seeking a mistrial, and in Gore’s case the verdict had not ended in a mistrial at all; it had been reversed on appeal. The second trial was held in early 1999 before Circuit Judge Leslie Rothenberg. Gore testified again, admitting he knew Novick and had been with her the night in question but denying he had killed her, and the jury convicted him on February 12, 1999. He was sentenced to death again on April 19, 1999. The state Supreme Court affirmed on April 19, 2001, holding that one improper question at the retrial had been met with a sustained objection and a curative instruction and that Gore himself had later returned to the subject many times.
Gore’s competence was argued over for most of his time in the courts. In the Columbia County case in 1998, two court-appointed experts ruled him competent and two defense experts ruled him incompetent; the judge ruled him competent and noted his manipulative behavior. In the Novick postconviction case, three experts were appointed; one judged him incompetent and two competent. After a notice of incompetence in 2002, a hearing on April 9, 2004, ruled him competent. The trial judges concluded, the Florida Supreme Court said in 2009, that Gore had deliberately manipulated the proceedings. His death warrant was signed on May 13, 2013. The execution was delayed three times. Marshall Lee Gore was executed at Florida State Prison, Starke, on October 1, 2013, and pronounced dead at 6:12 p.m., 23 years after the first death sentence.
Gore never admitted either murder. His account, given under oath at the Novick retrial, was that Novick had lent him her car and gone off with other men, and that the State’s witnesses had lied. Two juries rejected that account in the Novick case and one in the Roark case. The State’s case in both murders was circumstantial. A conviction built that way had to be reversed once because an appellate court would not let a prosecutor’s conduct stand, and it was reinstated at a retrial because the rule against twice trying a man does not protect him from a retrial that follows his own successful appeal.
Police in East St. Louis, Illinois, arrested Lorenzo Fayne on July 24, 1993, in connection with the murder of Faith Davis, 17. According to the Illinois Appellate Court, he confessed not only to her death but to the killings of four other young people in St. Clair County: Aree Hunt, 6, Fallon Flood, 9, Glenda Jones, 17, and Latonda Dean, 14. The Associated Press, reporting in 2009, put the killings in 1989, 1992 and 1993. He was charged with five counts of first-degree murder.
The Hunt case went to trial first. A jury rejected his insanity defense and convicted him in 1994 of first-degree murder. At the sentencing hearing, August 16 to 18, 1994, the jury heard evidence of all five killings and could not agree on a death sentence. Fayne received natural life, and the sentence was affirmed in 1996.
The State then turned to the four remaining murders and announced that it would again seek death. On March 15, 1996, Fayne’s lawyers moved to dismiss the remaining cases and to bar a death penalty hearing. They argued that the first jury had already considered all five killings when it declined to impose death, and that the constitutional protection against being tried twice for the same offense should prevent the State from asking a second jury to do what the first had refused. The trial court denied the motion in the Davis case on April 24, 1996, and in the Flood, Jones and Dean cases on June 5, 1996.
Fayne appealed, and the appeals were consolidated. The State asked the appellate court to dismiss for lack of jurisdiction; the court refused in orders in January and June 1998, holding that an Illinois Supreme Court rule allowed a defendant to appeal the denial of a double jeopardy motion before trial. On October 16, 1998, the Appellate Court of Illinois, Fifth District, ruled against Fayne in an opinion by Justice Goldenhersh, with Justices Rarick and Maag concurring. The court relied on two earlier Illinois decisions in a case called People v. Page, which had held that a decision against death in one murder case does not bar a death sentence for a different murder in a later case. The question at a capital sentencing, the court reasoned, is whether a defendant should be sentenced to death for a particular murder. A jury’s mercy in one case was not an acquittal of the next.
Illinois prison records list a life sentence for murder in each of the five St. Clair County cases, none discharged, with his projected discharge given as "Ineligible." The records show him at Menard Correctional Center in Chester as of October 2026. In October 2009, Milwaukee prosecutors charged him with first-degree intentional homicide in the 1989 death of a 32-year-old woman, Rita Scott, after DNA testing linked him to it, the Associated Press reported. No outcome of that charge has been reported.
Charles Severance, a former candidate for mayor of Alexandria, Virginia, in 1996 and 2000, was convicted on November 2, 2015, of the killings of three well-known residents of the city: Nancy Dunning, a real estate agent and the wife of the city’s sheriff, in December 2003; Ronald Kirby, the region’s senior transportation planner, in November 2013; and Ruthanne Lodato, a music teacher from a family of Alexandria judges, in February 2014. A caregiver who worked for the Lodato family was wounded and survived. Prosecutors said he was taking revenge on what he called the city’s "enforcement class." The jury convicted him of two counts of capital murder, one of first-degree murder, malicious wounding, firearm offenses and possession of a firearm by a felon. On January 21, 2016, Judge Randy I. Bellows in Fairfax County Circuit Court sentenced him to three consecutive life terms plus 48 years, with life without parole on the capital counts.
The Court of Appeals of Virginia affirmed on May 23, 2017. The Supreme Court of Virginia agreed to hear only one question, whether double jeopardy forbade convicting him of two counts of capital murder. Virginia defines capital murder to include the killing of more than one person within three years, and the two capital counts named Kirby and Lodato.
On July 19, 2018, in an opinion by Justice D. Arthur Kelsey, the court affirmed. The Blockburger test, which asks whether each of two statutes requires proof of a fact the other does not, applies only when a single act violates two statutes, the court said, and "killing two victims at two different times in two different places constitutes two different criminal acts." Justice Powell dissented. She would have held that the two capital counts described the same offense, with the same victims in the same three-year period differing only in the order in which they were listed, and would have vacated one life sentence. As of that 2018 ruling, his convictions and sentences stood.
The Severance question is the one serial cases pose more often than any other. A serial offender does not repeat a single crime. He commits several, and the rule against double jeopardy has to be asked whether the law is punishing the pattern or the acts. The Supreme Court of Virginia answered that the acts counted.
Frank Athen Walls was 19 when two people were killed in Okaloosa County, in the Florida Panhandle, on July 22, 1987: Edward Alger, an airman stationed at Eglin Air Force Base, and his girlfriend, Ann Peterson. Walls was arrested the following day, when his roommate went to the police, and indicted on August 10, 1987. He was convicted of both murders, with burglary, kidnapping and theft counts, on July 18, 1988, and won a new trial on appeal; his first death sentence was thrown out because a jail officer had drawn statements from him by deception that were later used in competency evaluations. The first jury had recommended life for the murder of Alger.
Because of publicity in Okaloosa County, the retrial was held in Jackson County. On June 18, 1992, the second jury convicted Walls on all counts: two counts of first-degree murder, burglary of a structure, armed burglary of a dwelling, two counts of kidnapping and petit theft. The state relied on the physical evidence, investigators, the pathologist and a taped confession, which was played in full; the defense called no witnesses at the guilt phase. At the penalty phase the defense put on the history of his childhood and mental health, including a psychologist’s testimony that he was impaired at the time. The jury recommended death for Peterson’s murder by a vote of 12 to 0.
For Alger’s murder, a death sentence was not an option. The first jury had already recommended life, and double jeopardy barred the State from seeking death on that count at the second trial. On July 29, 1992, the judge sentenced Walls to death for the murder of Peterson and to life with a 25-year minimum for the murder of Alger. The rule held where it was supposed to. The same man received two different sentences for two deaths on the same night, because one jury had said no and the law would not let a second jury say otherwise.
In 1994 the Florida Supreme Court affirmed the convictions and sentences, and in October of that year Walls pleaded no contest to first-degree murder in a third case, that of Audrey Gygi, in May 1987, after DNA evidence linked him to it. He received life. Under a deal with prosecutors he also admitted two earlier killings, those of Tommie Lou Whiddon in March 1985 and Cynthia Sue Condra in September 1986; no conviction for either was reported.
His final litigation came in December 2025, when the Governor signed a death warrant on November 18. Okaloosa County Circuit Judge William Stone denied the motions in early December. On December 11 the Florida Supreme Court affirmed; the majority held that the intellectual disability claim was procedurally barred because it had been raised and rejected, that the age-based claim was filed too late and failed on the merits, and that the delay claim failed under earlier decisions. Justice Jorge Labarga dissented, and Justice Charles Canady was recused. A federal judge denied a stay on health grounds, the Eleventh Circuit upheld that ruling, and on December 18 the U.S. Supreme Court denied his last requests without explanation. Frank Walls was executed at Florida State Prison near Starke that evening, pronounced dead at 6:11 p.m., aged 58, the nineteenth execution carried out in Florida that year.
Brian Dugan pleaded guilty in November 1985 to two murders in northern Illinois, Donna Schnorr, a 27-year-old nurse from Geneva, killed in July 1984, and Melissa Ackerman, a 7-year-old girl from Somonauk, killed in June 1985. He received two life sentences. During the plea talks he told prosecutors that he had also killed Jeanine Nicarico, 10, in February 1983, and that he had acted alone. He would confess formally, he said, only if he was promised that he would not be executed.
No promise was made. By then three young men from Aurora had already been charged with the Nicarico murder, and two of them had been sentenced to death. Their cases went on for another ten years through reversals and retrials. The Illinois Supreme Court overturned the convictions, ruling they should have been tried separately, in January 1988 according to the Daily Herald’s timeline and January 1989 according to the National Registry of Exonerations. At the retrials much of the evidence pointing to Dugan was kept from the juries, the registry says, and testimony from a police dog trainer was used against his account that he had acted alone. One man was convicted a second time on February 1, 1990, and again sentenced to death; the other was convicted at a third trial on May 17, 1991, and sentenced to 80 years. On November 3, 1995, at a third trial, after two weeks of prosecution testimony, a judge acquitted the first man, who walked free. On December 8, 1995, the charges against the other were dropped. A 1995 DNA test matched biological evidence from the crime to Dugan, according to a case summary by the Center on Wrongful Convictions at Northwestern University.
Dugan was indicted for the Nicarico murder in November 2005 on DNA evidence, while already in prison. He pleaded guilty on July 28, 2009, with no deal, and a jury sentenced him to death on November 11, 2009. Between the plea and the sentencing hearing, the question the state had been unwilling to answer in 1985 came back in a new form. The state paid for the defense, at an estimated $750,000 to $1 million, from a fund for indigent defendants in capital cases that the Nicarico case had helped bring about, the Daily Herald reported. At the hearing, two attorneys who had negotiated in 1985 testified that Dugan’s main aim had been to save himself, because a formal confession without a promise against the death penalty could be used to execute him.
A Daily Herald headline the day after the verdict said Dugan had come within minutes of having his life spared. On December 1, 2009, his lawyers asked that the first, discarded verdict form be preserved. They argued that the life verdict was final and that replacing it amounted to double jeopardy. Judge George Bakalis kept both forms but did not make the first one part of the official record. On December 16, 2009, he formally sentenced Dugan to death and set February 25 as a nominal execution date, which was expected to pass while the automatic appeal went to the Illinois Supreme Court. Dugan was placed on death row at Pontiac Correctional Center.
The appeal never ran its course. On March 9, 2011, Governor Pat Quinn signed a law abolishing the death penalty in Illinois, effective July 1, and commuted the sentences of the 15 men on the state’s death row to life in prison. Dugan was one of them. The National Registry of Exonerations describes the commuted sentences as life without parole, and records him as serving life as of August 2020. The double jeopardy argument over the verdict form was never decided on appeal.
Two questions stayed open. Dugan has said since 1985 that he acted alone, and repeated it in court in 2009. Prosecutors argued at one of the earlier trials that he might have had accomplices. No one else stands convicted of the crime. And his motive for offering to confess is in dispute: his lawyers said he wanted to save innocent men, while the prosecutors in 2009, and the two attorneys who testified, said his first aim was to save his own life.
Thomas Eugene Creech has spent more than 50 years in Idaho custody, most of them on death row. He was convicted of five murders in three states: two men in Valley County, Idaho, in November 1974, convicted in 1976; two more in Oregon and California the same year, the Ninth Circuit listing the convictions as 1979 and 1980; and David Dale Jensen, 23, a fellow prisoner, in Ada County, Idaho, on May 13, 1981, to which he pleaded guilty on August 28, 1981. A jury in Arizona acquitted him of the one other killing for which he stood trial, that of a 70-year-old man in Tucson in 1973. The Associated Press reported in 2024 that authorities say they have no doubt he was responsible. The verdict stands, and in law he is not guilty of it.
He has also been the subject of claims far larger than his record. At various times he told investigators he had killed 40 or more people, and in 1993 the U.S. Supreme Court recorded that he had admitted killing or taking part in the killing of at least 26. His lawyers say his counts were grossly exaggerated, and many early confessions were given under so-called truth serum drugs now discredited, according to the Associated Press. Authorities have attributed other deaths to him that were never charged; he denies one of them.
The Valley County sentence of death in March 1976 was reduced to life after the U.S. Supreme Court barred mandatory death sentences. The sentence in force is for Jensen’s killing, first imposed in January 1982, vacated on procedure, reimposed in 1983, vacated again in federal habeas proceedings, and reimposed on April 17, 1995, by Judge Robert Newhouse. In Creech v. Richardson, a Ninth Circuit panel of Judges William A. Fletcher, Jay S. Bybee and Morgan Christen affirmed the denial of federal relief; the U.S. Supreme Court denied review on October 10, 2023. The Commission of Pardons and Parole denied commutation on a 3 to 3 vote on January 29, 2024.
On February 28, 2024, Idaho tried to execute him. The execution was called off after about an hour. It was the state’s first attempt in 12 years. Creech then argued in state court that any second attempt would be cruel and unusual punishment and would violate the ban on double jeopardy. A state district court dismissed his petition on September 5, 2024. On October 16, 2024, the Ninth Circuit ruled that the judge in his clemency lawsuit should have recused herself because of her friendship with the Ada County prosecutor and sent that case back for reassignment. The same day the state served him with a new death warrant, setting a second execution for November 13, 2024.
The Idaho Supreme Court affirmed the dismissal of his petition on November 5, 2024. Relying on a 1947 U.S. Supreme Court decision, Louisiana ex rel. Francis v. Resweber, it held that a second attempt did not on these facts amount to cruel and unusual punishment, and that the first attempt had not imposed any punishment beyond what the legislature allowed. It held that Creech had not shown that a further attempt would inflict unnecessary pain. A federal judge, G. Murray Snow, had by then stayed the November date. In March 2025 Idaho’s governor signed a law changing the state’s primary execution method, and in July 2026 Creech and another prisoner sued over the new procedures. As of October 2026 he is on death row, with no execution date reported.
Of the double jeopardy claims raised in these cases, the Creech claim is the most novel, and the one with the least footing in precedent. Double jeopardy protects against a second prosecution or a second punishment for the same offense. An execution that began and did not finish raised the argument that the state had tried once. Idaho’s highest court rejected it, on the reasoning that the state had not yet carried out the sentence it was entitled to carry out.
Set side by side, these cases describe a rule with edges rather than a rule that either holds or fails. Sharon Kinne’s acquittal was final, and she lived free of that charge until she died. Benjamin Miller’s case was dismissed on double jeopardy grounds after a federal court ordered him released or retried, and Connecticut did not try again. Marshall Lee Gore’s retrial went ahead because his own appeal had undone the first verdict. Lorenzo Fayne lost the argument that one jury’s refusal of death in one case barred death in the next four. Charles Severance lost the argument that two capital counts were one offense. Frank Walls kept the one thing a first jury’s life recommendation was meant to give him. Brian Dugan’s lawyers raised the verdict form and the court did not have to rule. Thomas Creech’s lawyers raised the failed execution and the Idaho Supreme Court did not accept it.
Only Angus Sinclair went back into a courtroom because the rule itself had been changed. The Scottish Parliament chose to answer one acquittal with a statute, and the statute worked as designed: new evidence, tested by three judges, a jury, a conviction, a sentence that no one in Scotland had seen. The English reform of 2003 followed the same logic of exception for grave offenses. Neither reform erased the rule. Each carved a narrow exit from it, guarded by judges.
The United States has not followed. In these cases the American courts, applying the old rule, protected a man’s acquittal, struck down a prosecutor’s tactics, and left the State to live with the limits of its evidence. Whether that is a feature or a flaw depends on which of these cases a reader is looking at.
• 1961: Angus Sinclair pleads to culpable homicide in Glasgow (a child’s death); sentenced to ten years' detention.
• June 1961: A Missouri jury acquits Sharon Kinne of the murder of Patricia Jones.
• January 1962: Kinne convicted of murder of her husband; reversed by the Missouri Supreme Court in 1963.
• September 1964: A death in Mexico City; Kinne convicted there in October 1965.
• December 7, 1969: Kinne escapes from a Mexican prison.
• 1967 to 1971: Five young women die in Stamford, Connecticut.
• January 1973: Benjamin Miller found not guilty by reason of insanity on three counts.
• October 1977: Christine Eadie and Helen Scott die after leaving the World’s End pub in Edinburgh.
• 1982: Sinclair convicted of offenses against children; life sentence.
• 1985: Brian Dugan pleads guilty to two murders (November); offers to confess to the Nicarico killing only if spared execution.
• March 14, 1990: Marshall Lee Gore convicted in the Roark case; death sentence April 3, 1990.
• 1992: Frank Walls convicted at retrial (June 18); death sentence July 29 for one murder; life for the other.
• August 16 to 18, 1994: Lorenzo Fayne’s sentencing hearing in the Hunt case; no death sentence.
• October 1, 1998: Florida Supreme Court reverses Gore’s Novick conviction for prosecutorial misconduct.
• October 16, 1998: Illinois Appellate Court rejects Fayne’s double jeopardy appeal.
• February 12, 1999: Gore reconvicted; death sentence April 19, 1999.
• June 4, 2001: Sinclair convicted of the 1978 murder of Mary Gallacher.
• September 10, 2007: Lord Clarke upholds the no case to answer submission; Sinclair acquitted of the World’s End murders.
• July 28, 2009: Dugan pleads guilty to the Nicarico murder; death sentence November 11; formal sentence December 16, 2009.
• November 2011: Double Jeopardy (Scotland) Act 2011 comes into force.
• December 2012: Lord Advocate applies to set aside Sinclair’s acquittal.
• October 1, 2013: Gore executed.
• March 27, 2014: High Court sets aside Sinclair’s acquittal.
• November 14, 2014: Sinclair convicted at the retrial; 37-year punishment part.
• November 2, 2015: Charles Severance convicted; sentenced January 21, 2016.
• March 24, 2016: Sinclair’s sentence appeal refused.
• July 19, 2018: Supreme Court of Virginia affirms Severance’s convictions on the double jeopardy question.
• March 11, 2019: Sinclair dies at HMP Glenochil.
• February 28, 2024: Idaho’s execution attempt on Thomas Creech called off.
• November 5, 2024: Idaho Supreme Court rejects Creech’s cruel-and-unusual argument against a second attempt.
• January 2025: Missouri charge against Kinne dismissed; case closed January 30.
• December 18, 2025: Frank Walls executed.