In the case of Waller v. Florida, 1969, Robert Elihue Waller Jr., a civil rights activist was arrested twice for the same crime - once by city officials and then again by state authorities. He had removed a racially divisive historical plaque from a public monument in St. Augustine, Florida and threw it into the Matanzas River as part of an organized protest against racial discrimination. The U.S Supreme Court ruled that his second trial violated the Double Jeopardy Clause of Fifth Amendment which prohibits anyone from being prosecuted twice for substantially the same crime. This ruling clarified that separate sovereigns within one nation (such as states) cannot separately prosecute someone for the same criminal act.

In the dissenting opinion for Waller v. Florida, Justice Black argued that the Double Jeopardy Clause of the Fifth Amendment should not be applied to state and local governments through the Fourteenth Amendment. He believed this interpretation was a departure from historical understanding and precedent. According to him, double jeopardy protections were traditionally understood as only applying to successive prosecutions by the same sovereign entity - in other words, an individual could not be tried twice by either federal or state government for the same offense but could face prosecution from both levels of government separately without violating double jeopardy principles. Therefore, he disagreed with majority's decision which held that city and state are not separate entities for purposes of double jeopardy analysis.