## Facts

- Alfonse Bartkus was tried in federal court for robbing a federally insured savings and loan association in Cicero, Illinois, and was acquitted by a federal jury in December 1953.
- In January 1954, an Illinois grand jury indicted Bartkus for robbery under state law based on substantially the same underlying conduct as the federal charge.
- Bartkus was convicted in the Criminal Court of Cook County and sentenced to life imprisonment under Illinois’s habitual criminal statute.
- Bartkus argued that the Illinois prosecution was barred because he had already been acquitted federally, and he raised a former-acquittal plea that the state court rejected.
- The record reflected cooperation between federal and state officials, including federal investigative materials being provided to Illinois prosecutors and alleged coordination concerning accomplice testimony timing.

## Issues

1. Whether Illinois’s prosecution after Bartkus’s federal acquittal for substantially the same conduct violated the Double Jeopardy Clause of the Fifth Amendment as applied to the States through the Fourteenth Amendment.
2. Whether, even if double jeopardy was not incorporated, the Illinois prosecution violated Fourteenth Amendment due process because it functioned as a “sham and cover” or “tool” of federal authorities.

## Decision

- The Supreme Court affirmed the Illinois judgment, holding that the state prosecution did not violate the Fourteenth Amendment.
- The Court declined to treat the Double Jeopardy Clause as automatically applicable to the States on these facts and analyzed the claim under due process.
- The Court held that ordinary cooperation between federal and state authorities did not convert Illinois’s case into a second federal trial.
- The Court recognized that due process could be violated if a state prosecution were merely a tool or sham for another sovereign, but found the record insufficient to establish that level of domination or pretext.

## Legal Principles

- Successive prosecutions by separate sovereigns (state and federal) for the same underlying conduct do not, without more, violate the Fourteenth Amendment.
- The Fourteenth Amendment does not, by its own force, make the Fifth Amendment’s Double Jeopardy Clause automatically binding on the States in the manner argued.
- Intergovernmental investigative and prosecutorial cooperation, standing alone, does not establish that one sovereign’s prosecution is a sham for the other.
- A state prosecution may violate due process if it is effectively controlled by another sovereign such that it is a “sham and cover” for a second prosecution, but that exception requires proof beyond routine coordination.

## Conclusion

The Court upheld Illinois’s conviction despite a prior federal acquittal, permitting separate state and federal prosecutions arising from the same conduct unless the later case is shown to be a pretextual proceeding so dominated by another sovereign that it violates due process.


Bartkus v. Illinois, 359 U.S. 121 (1959)