What happens when a state supreme court seemingly throws out the most basic rule of Supreme Court precedent in criminal law? You’d expect a swift and unanimous smackdown, right? Well, that’s precisely what we got this week in the case of McElrath v. Georgia, with Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson delivering a concise and clear opinion for a unanimous Supreme Court.
The facts of McElrath are undeniably tragic. Damian McElrath, suffering from mental illness and a delusional belief that his adoptive mother was poisoning him, killed her. Georgia charged him with malice murder (premeditated), felony murder, and aggravated assault. The jury at trial reached a split verdict: not guilty by reason of insanity on the malice murder charge, but guilty on the lesser charges of felony murder and aggravated assault.
For anyone familiar with the Fifth Amendment’s double jeopardy clause, the jury’s acquittal on the malice murder charge should have been the end of that matter. But the Supreme Court of Georgia saw it differently, labeling the seemingly contradictory verdicts as “repugnant” under state law. Their reasoning? McElrath couldn’t simultaneously lack the mental state for malice murder (due to insanity) and possess the mental state for the lesser offenses. Therefore, the Georgia court argued, the jury’s finding of not guilty by reason of insanity wasn’t a true “verdict” at all, paving the way for a retrial on the very charge he was acquitted of.
Justice Jackson, thankfully, wasn’t buying it. Her opinion wasted no time in reiterating the long-established principle that “a verdict of acquittal is final, ending a defendant’s jeopardy, and … is a bar to subsequent prosecution for the same offence.” Defining an acquittal as “any ruling that the prosecution’s proof is insufficient to establish criminal liability,” Jackson made it unequivocally clear that the jury’s “not guilty by reason of insanity” verdict squarely fit this definition.
Once rendered, an acquittal is “inviolate,” Jackson emphasized, quoting the Court’s own description of this rule as “[p]erhaps the most fundamental rule in the history of double jeopardy jurisprudence.” The Court acknowledged the possibility of “compromise, compassion, lenity, or misunderstanding” influencing a “not guilty” verdict but firmly stated that the Double Jeopardy Clause “prohibits second-guessing the reason for a jury’s acquittal,” recognizing the jury’s “unreviewable power to return a verdict of not guilty even for impermissible reasons.”
Georgia’s argument that its “repugnant verdict” doctrine meant “no acquittal took place” under state law was swiftly dismissed. Justice Jackson firmly declared, “We cannot agree. … Whether an acquittal has occurred for purposes of the Double Jeopardy Clause is a question of federal, not state, law.” The key factor, she explained, is whether “the factfinder acted on its view that the prosecution had failed to prove its case.” In McElrath’s situation, “the jury’s verdict of not guilty by reason of insanity constituted such a determination.” Consequently, it was a clear acquittal under the Double Jeopardy Clause, barring any retrial on that charge.
While this ruling might not become a landmark case frequently cited in legal scholarship, its significance in protecting fundamental constitutional rights cannot be overstated. The Supreme Court’s intervention prevented a blatant violation of McElrath’s double jeopardy rights by the state of Georgia.
At Kilgore & Rodriguez, we understand the critical importance of upholding constitutional safeguards like the Double Jeopardy Clause. This case serves as a powerful reminder that even in complex legal scenarios, fundamental principles designed to protect individual liberties must be rigorously defended. The unanimous decision in McElrath v. Georgia is a welcome affirmation of these bedrock principles.