charged with first degree murder. Obtaining a reversal, the State
prosecuted Palko a second time and won a conviction of first degree
murder and sentence to death. In response to the petitioner's
contentions that a retrial under one indictment would subject him to
double jeopardy in violation of the Fifth Amendment, if the prosecution
were one on behalf of the United States and "that whatever is forbidden
by the Fifth Amendment is forbidden by the Fourteenth also,"[980] eight
Justices[981] replied that the State statute did not subject him to
double jeopardy "so acute and shocking that our polity will not endure
it"; nor did "it violate those 'fundamental principles of liberty and
justice which lie at the base of all our civil and political'
institutions.'" Consistently with past behavior, the Court thus refused
to assert that the defendant had been subjected to treatment of the type
prohibited by the double jeopardy clause of the Fifth Amendment; nor did
it, on the other hand, repudiate the possibility of situations in which
the Fourteenth Amendment would prevent the States from inflicting double
jeopardy. Whether a State is prohibited by the latter amendment, after a
trial free from error, from trying the accused over again or from
wearing out the accused "by a multitude of cases with accumulated
trials" were questions which the Court reserved for future disposition.
Subsequently, in Louisiana ex rel. Francis _v._ Resweber,[982] a
majority of the Court assumed, "but without so deciding, that violation
of the principles of the Fifth Amendment * * *, as to double jeopardy
* * *, would be violative of the due process clause of the Fourteenth
Amendment," and then concluded that the Palko case was decisive, there
being "no difference from a constitutional point of view between a new
trial for error of law at the instance of the State that results in a
death sentence instead of imprisonment for life and an execution" by
electrocution that follows after "an accidental failure in equipment had
rendered a previous attempt at execution ineffectual."

Rights of Prisoners

Access to the Courts.--A State prison regulation requiring that
all legal papers sought to be filed in court by inmates must first be
submitted to the institution for approval and which was applied so as to
obstruct efforts of a prisoner to petition a federal court for a writ of
_habeas corpus_ is void. Whether a petition for such writ is properly
drawn and