Heath V. Alabama - Facts and Procedural History

Facts and Procedural History

In 1981, the defendant, Larry Gene Heath, traveled from Alabama to Georgia, where he met with two other individuals whom he had hired to kill his wife Rebecca. They returned with him to his house and, after he left the scene, they killed his wife. He was arrested later that year and, on February 10, 1982, pled guilty in a Georgia court to the crime of murder, and was sentenced to life imprisonment.

Subsequently, a grand jury in Alabama, his state of residence, indicted him for the crime of murder during a kidnapping, and he entered a plea of "autrefois convict and former jeopardy under the Alabama and United States Constitutions," by which he stated that he was not eligible to be punished in Alabama because a Georgia court had already convicted and sentenced him for the same crime, and that the crime had, in fact, not taken place in Alabama. The prosecutor argued, however, that because the defendant's wife had been kidnapped in Alabama, the murder "may be punished" there. On January 12, 1983, a jury in the Alabama court convicted Heath of "murder during a kidnapping in the first degree," a capital offense, He was sentenced to death, and the Alabama Court of Criminal Appeals affirmed this decision on direct appeal. The Alabama Supreme Court, after granting certiorari, affirmed the decision of the lower court as well.

The United States Supreme Court then granted certiorari to determine whether the conviction of Heath violated the precedent that had been set by an earlier case, Brown v. Ohio, 432 U.S. 161 (1977), in which the Court had held that one cannot be punished consecutively for two different offenses if the proof of both offenses is identical.