Prosecuting a man in Colorado after he was already prosecuted and acquitted in a foreign country does not run afoul of the legal prohibition on double jeopardy, the Court of Appeals ruled for the first time on Thursday.

The three-judge appellate panel affirmed the 2017 murder conviction of Rafael Aguilar Garcia, following an unusual scenario in which Garcia killed his wife’s love interest, fled to Mexico and was tried there based on evidence gathered in Mesa County.

A Mexican tribunal, which had jurisdiction because of Garcia’s Mexican citizenship, acquitted Garcia in 2012. The Colorado Attorney General’s Office had sent a casebook for the tribunal to use following unsuccessful extradition attempts.

But when Garcia arrived at Denver International Airport in 2016, police arrested him and he stood trial for the murder. A jury convicted him and Garcia appealed, arguing the acquittal in Mexico triggered the constitutional prohibition against being prosecuted twice for the same offense.

The concept of dual sovereignty allows for a person to be the subject of prosecution by the federal and state government for the same offense, given their status as sovereign entities. Colorado law specifically bars such prosecutions where the federal government, states or municipalities could all have jurisdiction. The state Supreme Court in 1990 affirmed that double jeopardy protections extended to tribal nations, too.

The Court in that instance wrote that the law “uniformly abolishes the dual sovereignty doctrine, prohibiting prosecution under Colorado law when the defendant has been subjected to a prior prosecution by any separate sovereign – federal, state or tribal.”

The appellate judges in Garcia’s case acknowledged the Supreme Court’s decision bound them, but read its conclusion literally: the Supreme Court mentioned tribal nations, but said nothing about other countries.

“Many Colorado statutes demonstrate that where the General Assembly intends to refer to foreign countries in a statute, it does so explicitly,” wrote Judge Dennis Graham in the panel’s May 13 opinion.

Garcia also argued that because Colorado’s prohibition on dual sovereignty applied to other states, Mexico, being comprised of states, was covered as well. The panel rejected that line of thinking.

“This interpretation would mean that a previous prosecution in Mexico, where there are states, would prohibit subsequent prosecution in Colorado, but a previous prosecution in Canada, where there are provinces, would not prohibit subsequent prosecution in Colorado,” wrote Graham, a retired appellate judge who sat on the panel at the chief justice’s assignment.

A majority of the U.S. Supreme Court in 2018 upheld the dual sovereignty doctrine on the grounds that an offense against the state and federal governments is really two offenses, for which there may be two prosecutions. Justice Neil M. Gorsuch dissented, writing that a “free society does not allow its government to try the same individual for the same crime until it’s happy with the result.”

Some scholars have argued the U.S. Constitution does not support dual sovereignty, given that the federal government cannot be supreme over the states if both are considered sovereign in their jurisdictions.

Anthony J. Colangelo, a law professor at Southern Methodist University who has written about dual sovereignty, believed Colorado’s Court of Appeals decided the case correctly.

“If the legislature wanted to include foreign nations in its dilution of separate sovereigns it clearly could have done so,” he said.

Following the appellate panel’s ruling in Garcia’s case, Mesa County District Attorney Daniel P. Rubinstein said he was happy with the outcome. “The evidence against him was very solid and we will never know why the Mexican prosecution was unsuccessful, but our faith in the American criminal justice system is not misplaced, and justice will finally be served in this case,” Rubinstein said.

The case is People v. Garcia.