by TChris

During her 2001 murder trial in Fort Worth, Texas, a prosecutor cross-examining Swanda Marie Lewis asked whether she had declined a police detective's invitation to discuss her husband's death. Judge Sharen Wilson granted a mistrial to remedy the improper reference to Lewis' exercise of her Fifth Amendment right to silence. Lewis' lawyer, Danny Burns, later moved to dismiss the case.

Burns ... argued that the mistrial was prompted by prosecutorial misconduct and that the constitutional prohibition against double jeopardy barred Lewis from being tried again [for] the same crime.

When the government deliberately provokes a mistrial, double jeopardy generally protects an accused from a second trial. Judge Wilson denied the dismissal motion, but the state court of appeals ruled last week (for the second time) that the prosecutor's flagrant misconduct provoked the mistrial, saving Lewis from a second prosecution.