@Seek_Kolinahr That’s not the same thing at all. We’re talking about being found guilty of murdering the same person twice, which is impossible. Speeding is hardly comparable.
If the person serves some time and the victim is found to be alive, the sentence would be vacated. If you went and actually killed that person after being released, you could be tried and convicted for it because the false conviction was reversed.
The problem is that it takes a body for most murder cases to go to trial. If there’s no body, and there wouldn’t be if there was no murder, it would be very hard to convict someone of that murder without a confession.
The law is never black and white, though. Judd’s character in the film could’ve been tried and convicted again because she committed the actual murder in a different state. But the actual law does not have any specified number of days/hours/minutes that have to pass before you can be convicted of the same crime written into it. Additionally, if you served the sentence and then went back and actually killed that person, they’d have to deem the first conviction the result of a mistrial, toss it from the person’s record, and the killer could very well get time served. The wrongly accused could also sue for the wrongful conviction.
It wouldn’t be as simple as it was in the movie, no, but the double jeopardy law would come into play in a similar situation. What I’m saying is, you couldn’t be convicted of killing the same person without the initial conviction being addressed first, simply because a person cannot be murdered twice.