The Supreme Court agreed this week to consider whether a defendant accused of hacking into a website that tracks hot spots for artificial fishing reefs can be retried after his attorneys said he was tried in the wrong venue.
Timothy Smith is a software engineer and avid fisherman in Mobile, Alabama, who was accused of hacking into a website of Pensacola, Florida-based company StrikeLines.
Smith was accused of stealing data from StrikeLines and then posting the information on his social media. Smith then allegedly offered to take down the StikeLines data only if he got the location of grouper fishing hot spots.
“The extortion count was predicated on Mr. Smith’s alleged offer to remove his social media posts discussing StrikeLines’ coordinates in exchange for deep-water grouper coordinates,” according to court filings.
Smith was subsequently tried in Pensacola despite his objection and argument that the venue was improper due to his residence in the Southern District of Alabama. Servers for StrikeLines are located in the Middle District of Florida.
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Although Smith was acquitted on a federal hacking charge, he was convicted of theft of trade secrets and extortion. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit vacated the trade secrets count because it was attached to an incorrect venue, but the appeals court said a retrial was permissible.
Smith contends that he should have been acquitted for being tried in an improper venue and that he cannot be retried, arguing also that his case amounts to a double jeopardy dispute, which prohibits the government from prosecuting someone twice for the same crime.
The dispute has wound up as a split among federal appeals courts.
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Smith’s attorneys said the “courts of appeals are intractably divided over the appropriate remedy when a criminal defendant has been wrongly tried in an improper venue,” according to Smith’s petition.
The Sixth Amendment guarantees criminal defendants the right to a speedy and public trial by an impartial jury of the state and district where the crime was committed. It also provides that trials should happen in the state where the crime is committed, according to Article III.
