US Supreme Court bars retrial in murder case
The U.S. Supreme Court has barred the retrial of a Georgia man on a malice murder charge in the stabbing death of his mother after he was found not guilty by reason of insanity.
In a unanimous opinion issued Wednesday, the court held that the jury’s verdict in the state’s case against Damian McElrath constituted an acquittal of malice murder. And under the double jeopardy clause of the U.S. Constitution, McElrath cannot be retried on that count, the court held.
The ruling reverses a Georgia Supreme Court opinion that McElrath could be retried on malice murder and other charges. Though McElrath was found not guilty of malice murder by way of insanity, he was found guilty but mentally ill of felony murder and aggravated assault.
Richard Simpson, an attorney for McElrath, said he remains in custody, subject to a retrial on the felony murder charge.
“Our hope is that the state will review the evidence of McElrath’s severe mental illness and agree that he should be committed to a mental hospital with the Georgia Department of Behavioral Health,” Simpson told The Atlanta Journal-Constitution. “We are very pleased to have a unanimous decision in favor of our client. We were optimistic based on the oral argument and it is gratifying to see that the court agreed with our arguments.”
The U.S. Supreme Court rejected the state’s argument that the verdicts couldn’t stand because they were inconsistent.
“The jury’s verdict constituted an acquittal for double jeopardy purposes, and an acquittal is an acquittal notwithstanding its apparent inconsistency with other verdicts that the jury may have rendered,” the court said Wednesday. “That McElrath’s ‘not guilty by reason of insanity’ verdict was accompanied by other verdicts that appeared to rest on inconsistent findings is of no moment.”
Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson authored the opinion, which noted that the double jeopardy clause “prohibits second-guessing the reason for a jury’s acquittal.”
McElrath was 18 when he stabbed Diane McElrath more than 50 times at their Cobb County home in 2012. He had been diagnosed at a young age with bipolar disorder and attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, and believed that his mother was poisoning him, case records show.
The court said Wednesday that a jury’s determination that a defendant is not guilty by reason of insanity is a conclusion that criminal culpability had not been established, just as much as any other form of acquittal, for double jeopardy purposes.
An attorney representing Georgia in the case conceded during oral arguments in November that McElrath’s not guilty verdict would be an acquittal if considered in isolation.
The court said it cannot know why the jury in McElrath’s case acted as it did, and that “the double jeopardy clause forbids us to guess.”
Georgia had argued that McElrath’s acquittal of malice murder could be voided under a review of the jury’s findings, as McElrath couldn’t have different mental states at the same time.
“Georgia is mistaken,” the court said. “Once there has been an acquittal, our cases prohibit any speculation about the reasons for a jury’s verdict — even when there are specific jury findings that provide a factual basis for such speculation.”