Background
Louisiana charged Blair Taylor in 2014 with two counts of second-degree murder and five counts of attempted second-degree murder arising from a New Orleans shooting. His 2017 state conviction was vacated on appeal following the Supreme Court’s decision in Ramos v. Louisiana. Taylor was acquitted at his 2022 state retrial.
The federal government later charged Taylor with two counts of causing a death through the use of a firearm. Inga Petrovich, who had prosecuted Taylor’s 2017 state trial as an assistant district attorney and later became an assistant U.S. attorney, joined the federal prosecution team. After his federal conviction, Taylor argued for the first time on appeal that the prosecution violated double jeopardy and due process and also asserted ineffective assistance of counsel.
The Court’s Holding
The Fifth Circuit affirmed the judgment under plain-error review because Taylor had not raised his constitutional claims in the district court. His double-jeopardy argument failed at plain error’s second step: he identified no supporting case law showing that the district court committed a clear or obvious error under existing law based on Petrovich’s participation in both prosecutions.
The court likewise rejected Taylor’s prosecutorial-vindictiveness theory. Fifth Circuit precedent recognizes a general rule that successive prosecutions by different sovereigns tend to negate a finding of vindictiveness, and Taylor offered no controlling authority establishing a clear due-process violation in these circumstances. The panel declined to decide his ineffective-assistance claim because the record had not been developed for appellate review.
Key Takeaways
- A constitutional claim raised for the first time on appeal must satisfy the demanding plain-error standard.
- A prosecutor’s participation in successive state and federal cases did not establish a clear or obvious double-jeopardy or due-process error on this record.
- The court left the ineffective-assistance claim unresolved because it had not been raised below and the record was undeveloped.
Why It Matters
The decision illustrates the difficulty of overturning a federal conviction on an unpreserved theory involving successive prosecutions by separate sovereigns. Without controlling authority squarely establishing an error, a defendant ordinarily cannot meet plain error’s clear-or-obvious requirement.
It also reinforces the Fifth Circuit’s general practice of declining to resolve ineffective-assistance claims on direct appeal when the district court has had no opportunity to develop the relevant facts.