Page:Smith v. United States (2023).pdf/5

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delivered the opinion of the Court.

When a conviction is reversed because of a trial error, this Court has long allowed retrial in nearly all circumstances. We consider in this case whether the Constitution requires a different outcome when a conviction is reversed because the prosecution occurred in the wrong venue and before a jury drawn from the wrong location. We hold that it does not.

Timothy Smith is a software engineer and avid angler from Mobile, Alabama, who spends much of his time fishing, sailing, and diving in the Gulf of Mexico. In 2018, he discovered StrikeLines, a company that uses sonar equipment to identify private, artificial reefs that individuals construct to attract fish. StrikeLines sells the geographic coordinates of those reefs to interested parties. This business model irritated Smith, who believed that StrikeLines was unfairly profiting from the work of private reef builders.

Smith used a web application to obtain tranches of coordinates from the company’s website surreptitiously. He then announced on a social-media website that he had