Powell thought they couldn’t retry him as that would be double jeopardy. But like a lot of people, he didn’t quite understand what double jeopardy is. The worst example of this is surely the movie Double Jeopardy, which says that if you’re found not guilty of killing someone once, you can then actually kill them and the state can’t charge you. Powell’s idea—that a vacated verdict’s gone forever—wasn’t as dumb, but it was still wrong.
The fact was, Powell hadn’t been acquitted of anything, so double jeopardy didn’t apply. They retried him, found him newly guilty, and this time sentenced him to die.
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