Several weeks after rejecting a Double Jeopardy challenge to a retrial, the Court will once again take up the issue in  Evans v. Michigan (No. 11-1327).  In Evans the Court will decide whether the Double Jeopardy Clause bars retrial after the trial judge erroneously holds a particular fact to be an element of the offense and then grants a midtrial directed verdict of acquittal because the prosecution failed to prove that fact.

In addition to granting certiorari in Evans, the Court also issued a summary opinion in Parker v. Matthews (No. 11-845), the Court held that the decision of Sixth Circuit, which set aside two twenty-nine-year-old murder convictions, is a textbook example of what the Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act of 1996 (AEDPA) proscribes: “using federal habeas corpus review as a vehicle to second-guess the reasonable decisions of state courts.”