In the United States v. Wheeler case of 1977, the Supreme Court ruled that a Native American tribe member could be prosecuted by both tribal and federal courts for the same crime without violating double jeopardy protections in the Fifth Amendment. The court reasoned that because tribes are separate sovereign entities from U.S. government, they have inherent power to punish their members for criminal acts independently from federal or state authorities. Therefore, prosecution by both tribal and federal courts does not constitute successive prosecutions by "the same" sovereign entity as prohibited under double jeopardy clause of Fifth Amendment.

In the dissenting opinion for United States v. Wheeler, Justice Blackmun argued that the majority's decision undermined federal authority and failed to protect individual rights from tribal sovereignty. He contended that double jeopardy should apply because both prosecutions were by arms of the same sovereign - the U.S. government - even though one was a federal prosecution and another was by a Navajo tribal court. The fact that Congress had delegated some self-governance powers to tribes did not make them separate sovereigns in his view; they remained subordinate entities under ultimate federal control, with their criminal justice systems heavily influenced by U.S law and policy. Therefore, he believed it violated principles of fairness to allow two prosecutions for essentially the same crime just because different parts of what he saw as fundamentally one system carried them out.