In Green v. United States (1957), the U.S. Supreme Court ruled on a case involving double jeopardy, which is being tried twice for the same offense. The defendant, Elmer Green, was charged with both arson and first-degree murder after setting fire to a building that resulted in death of another person. In his initial trial, he was acquitted of murder but convicted of arson. However, the government appealed this decision and retried him for first-degree murder based on the same evidence used in his original trial; this time he was found guilty. Green argued that retrying him violated his Fifth Amendment rights protecting against double jeopardy as he had already been acquitted once for this crime using identical evidence from the previous trial. The Supreme Court agreed with Green's argument stating that it indeed constituted double jeopardy to try someone again for an offense they have previously been acquitted of even if it’s part of a greater charge or crime.

In the dissenting opinion for Green v. United States, Justice Black disagreed with the majority's interpretation of double jeopardy protections. He argued that a defendant should not be retried for an offense after being acquitted in a previous trial, even if it was on lesser charges than initially brought against them. In this case, he believed that since Green had been found guilty only of second-degree murder and not first-degree murder in his initial trial, retrying him on first-degree charges violated his Fifth Amendment rights against double jeopardy. Justice Black also expressed concern about potential abuses by prosecutors who could use hung juries to repeatedly try defendants until they achieved their desired verdicts.