double jeopardy

A legal doctrine which holds that legal action cannot be taken twice against someone for the same offense. Yes, I know there's new evidence linking the chief financial officer to the embezzlement scheme, but he's already been tried for that. If we bring this new evidence against him now, the judge will toss it out as an instance of double jeopardy. Don't worry, thanks to the legal tenet of double jeopardy, no one can ever bring charges about this accident against you again. The nightmare is over. A group already tried to bring a case against that big company for environmental damages, so if we try to do the same, it'll be thrown out due to double jeopardy.