Howard Sampson v. Aileene Love, Warden

CORNELIA G. KENNEDY, Circuit Judge.

Respondent-Appellant appeals from the District Court’s partial grant of petitionerappellee’s petition for a writ of habeas corpus. The underlying legal issue is whether the imposition of a higher sentence at appellee’s retrial was a product of vindictiveness toward appellee for asserting his right to appeal, and hence whether that harsher sentence violated the due process clause of the fourteenth amendment. The District Court found that the second jury’s imposition of a seventy-five-year sentence, when at least some of those jurors knew that the first jury…