WASHINGTON (CN) — The Supreme Court unanimously ruled on Wednesday that Georgia cannot put a mentally ill man on trial for a second time despite conflicting jury verdicts.
Damian McElrath tried in 2017 for the murder of his mother, Diane McElrath. He was charged with malice murder, aggravated assault and felony murder. A jury delivered a split verdict: not guilty of malice murder by reason of insanity, and guilty but mentally ill of felony murder and aggravated assault.
Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, a Joe Biden appointee, wrote in the court’s opinion that the jury’s decision, no matter how unusual, cannot be invalidated.
“Whatever the basis, the double jeopardy clause prohibits second-guessing the reason for a jury’s acquittal,” Jackson wrote. “As a result, ‘the jury holds an unreviewable power to return a verdict of not guilty even for impermissible reasons.’”
In McElrath’s case, the fact that the jury had determined he was not guilty by reason of insanity meant Georgia had failed to prove he was responsible for the crimes, Jackson said, and therefore the jury’s determination was equal to any other acquittal.
Justice Samuel Alito, a George W. Bush appointee, wrote a short concurring opinion to clarify his view that the court’s ruling extends no further than McElrath’s case.
“Nothing that we say today should be understood to express any view about whether a not-guilty verdict that is inconsistent with a verdict on another count and is not accepted by the trial judge constitutes an ‘acquittal’ for double jeopardy purposes,” Alito wrote.
In the years leading up to the murder, McElrath's mental health began to quickly deteriorate. He believed his mother was poisoning his food and drink, and that he was an FBI agent who regularly traveled to Russia and had killed multiple people.
McElrath was committed to a mental health facility in the weeks before the murder, where he received a diagnosis of schizophrenia. After two weeks, he was discharged when clinical staff believed he was no longer a threat to himself or others.
A week later, he stabbed his mother to death. In a note written in the aftermath, McElrath said that she had confessed to poisoning him and he killed her for it.
The conflicting verdicts could be categorized in two ways under Georgia law, either inconsistent or repugnant. Inconsistent verdicts amount to incompatible conclusions, whereas repugnant verdicts present a logical and legal impossibility.
The Georgia Supreme Court found that McElrath’s verdicts should be considered repugnant. The state court said it wasn’t legally possible for an individual to both be insane and not insane during a single crime. Under that finding, the Georgia high court vacated both McElrath’s conviction and the acquittal and remanded for a new trial.
McElrath claimed that a new trial on the malice murder charge should be barred under the double jeopardy clause. The trial court and state high court disagreed.
To come to this conclusion, the Georgia Supreme Court referred to its prior ruling finding that McElrath’s verdicts were repugnant. The state court said that the ruling made his verdicts void — or similar to a mistrial, instead of acquittal.
Jackson rejected the state courts’ findings, writing that, for starters, the question of whether an acquittal occurred in respect to the double jeopardy clause is up to federal law, not state law. Further, the state courts had no grounds to void the jury’s verdict despite how repugnant the result may have been.
“An acquittal is an acquittal, even ‘when a jury returns inconsistent verdicts,’” Jackson wrote. “As far as the Fifth Amendment is concerned, ‘[i]nconsistency in a verdict is not a sufficient reason for setting it aside.’”
McElrath urged the Supreme Court to reverse, claiming the state court ruling violated the Fifth Amendment. He argued that if he could be put on trial again, so could others.
“The issue presented is an important one, because the prohibition on exposing a person to double jeopardy is a fundamental constitutional right,” Richard Simpson, an attorney with Wiley Rein representing McElrath, wrote. “If permitted to stand, the decision below would expand the circumstances under which people in Georgia may face a second trial on criminal charges far beyond what is permissible under this court’s precedents.”
Georgia argued that the jury did not acquit him under state law. The state said all the jury did was declare McElrath both sane with respect to felony murder and insane with respect to malice murder.
“As the Georgia Supreme Court explained, under Georgia law, these ‘purported verdicts’ are in fact ‘no verdict at all,’ and a ‘nullity’ because the jury did not ‘resol[ve]’ the critical factual question of criminal intent: that is, whether McElrath was sane,” Stephen Petrany, Georgia’s solicitor general, wrote.
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