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by gloob 5730 days ago
But...

this wouldn't be double jeopardy. It would be a second instance of him refusing to turn over the passwords. Just as you can be tried twice for murder twice if there are two separate murders, you could be tried twice in this situation.

2 comments

This was (?) the way the USSR used to handle conscientious objectors:

They would send you a letter to go serve in the military, You would go to where you where assigned, You objected because of your conscience, They would then send you to a force labor camp or mental institution for a few years, The hard work, unhealthy food and living conditions, lacking health care, medical experiments, and violence among convicts would often destroy your physical and mental health, Then when you where released, They would send you a letter to serve in the military. … Unless, naturally, your conscience would no longer object to serving in the military…

But... it's the same password/encrypted data here.
Disclaimer: IANAL. Disclaimer: IANAA (I Am Not An American)

Assaulting the same person twice would still be two different assaults. Stealing a truck, getting caught and punished, and stealing the same truck again would, to my understanding, not be risk-free, legally speaking. I suspect the same would probably apply here, though given how unintuitive the law is, especially in this area, I may well be dead wrong.

Edit: To clarify, my point is that if the law amounts to "Refusal to turn over requested passwords => jail time", this would seemingly constitute a second refusal, even if the requested password was the same.

By the same logic, if the authorities had asked him one hundred times in the first interview for his password, and he'd refused one hundred times, then he could be charged with one hundred counts of the offence and put away for 30 years.

The courts aren't run by robots. If it's substantially the same instance of the offence, he couldn't be tried again.

That is not how it works...