EXPLAINER: Expert: Overseas conviction no bar to US charges

By ED WHITE
Associated Press

The filing of U.S. charges against a Chicago woman convicted of killed her wealthy mother during an overseas vacation is raising questions. How can someone who spent time in a prison abroad be hauled into an American court on similar charges? Heather Mack was arrested this week on her return to Chicago, after spending more than seven years in an Indonesian prison for murder. She’s charged in the U.S. with conspiring with a former boyfriend to kill her socialite mother, Sheila von Wiese-Mack, on Bali in 2014. The U.S. Constitution prohibits prosecuting someone twice for the same acts. But law professor and former prosecutor Barbara McQuade says there are exceptions; in this case two countries with different sets of laws. Mack’s attorney says he’ll “fight this to the end.”