Commentary: SCOTUS – Once a jury acquits someone of a crime, that’s it

By Christopher D.

Once a jury acquits a person at trial, even if it simultaneously issues a so-called “inconsistent guilty verdict,” the Double Jeopardy Clause prevents the government from retrying the person for the acquitted charge.

That rule applies even when the inconsistent guilty verdict is overturned on appeal, the U.S. Supreme Court’s ruled in McElrath v Georgia , 601 U.S. 87 (2024).

McElrath, as Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson wrote, “begins with tragedy.” Still, the case ends with the reaffirming of a fundamental principle of American law: The jury’s role is to stand between the people and their government, and when a jury acquits someone of a crime at trial, whatever the jury’s reason, the Double Jeopardy Clause protects them from being retried by their government.

“An acquittal is an acquittal ... even where both counts turn on the same issue of ultimate fact,” Jackson wrote.

The tragedy

Damian McElrath stabbed and killed his mother in 2012. He was 18 years old but had been diagnosed from a young age with bipolar disorder and attention deficit hyperactivity disorder.

“He responded poorly” to treatment, and this led to “quarrels between [he] and his mother.”

McElrath’s mental health deteriorated so substantially before his mother’s murder that he had come to believe she was poisoning him with “ammonia and pesticides” and that he was an FBI agent who traveled regularly to Russia to kill people.

Just weeks before the murder, he was committed to a hospital for two weeks, where he was diagnosed with schizophrenia. A week after his release, he stabbed his mother to death.

McElrath confessed to killing his mother “because she poisoned me.”

Trial and state appeal

The state of Georgia brought McElrath to trial on charges of murder, felony murder and aggravated assault. McElrath, for his part, did not dispute he had killed his mother, only that he was not guilty of the criminal offenses because he was legally insane at the time.

A jury acquitted McElrath of murder with a verdict of not guilty by reason of insanity. In a twist, however, the jury issued guilty but mentally ill verdicts for the other two offenses. How could that be? McElrath could not be criminally insane (lacking the ability to know right from wrong) but at the same time guilty but mentally ill.

McElrath appealed his guilty verdict to the Supreme Court of Georgia.

McElrath and Georgia agreed the verdicts were inconsistent. But they diverged on what should be done with verdicts that were at odds with each other.

The Supreme Court of Georgia resolved the case using the state’s so-called “repugnancy” doctrine that permits an appellate court to set aside a verdict as repugnant when a jury makes findings that can neither legally nor logically possibly exist simultaneously. The court set aside all three verdicts, including the acquittal, and remanded McElrath for a retrial on all the charges. At the second trial, McElrath moved to prevent a second trial on murder, arguing it violated the Double Jeopardy Clause to be retried since he’d been acquitted on that charge. The trial court denied his motion.

McElrath made a second appeal to the Supreme Court of Georgia on double jeopardy grounds. The court affirmed the trial court and ruled that repugnant verdicts are “valueless” and no different from the jury's inability to reach a verdict, which creates a mistrial. The court reasoned that “because no verdict under state law was issued, no acquittal took place,” and thus, double jeopardy did not prevent a retrial for murder.

SCOTUS decision

The Supreme Court of the United States disagreed, first on what an acquittal is and then on its implications for the repugnancy doctrine.

First and foremost, an acquittal is a federal question, not a state law question. Moreover, a person is acquitted when the jury rules on the “ultimate question of guilt or innocence.” Since the Georgia jury had done that in McElrath’s case on the murder finding him not guilty because of insanity double jeopardy barred the state from retrying him because “a jury’s verdict of acquittal is inviolate.” The McElrath court held, based on “[p]erhaps the most fundamental rule in the history of double jeopardy jurisprudence,” that a jury’s acquittal cannot be reviewed either on error or otherwise.

This part of the court’s ruling and reasoning is significant and precise. Once a jury issues an acquittal, a court is prohibited from making “ any speculation about the reasons for the jury’s verdict” (original emphasis). A jury may acquit due to “compromise, compassion, lenity, or misunderstanding of the governing law.” But [w]hatever the basis, the Double Jeopardy Clause prohibits second-guessing the reason for a jury’s acquittal because that is the only way to protect the jury’s “overriding responsibility to stand between the accused and a potentially arbitrary or abusive Government that is in command of the criminal sanction.”

The McElrath court addressed the “repugnant” doctrine as a label on a particular verdict.

“[L]abels do not control our analysis” as to what constitutes a verdict; the substance of the verdict is what is important. So, whether a verdict is labeled “repugnant” or given some other characterization, the issue for the court is simply whether the jury’s determination was on the ultimate question of guilt or innocence and whether the state had sufficiently proven its case.

In this case, the jury’s decision that McElrath was not guilty because of insanity was a ruling on the ultimate question of guilt or innocence and determined the state failed to meet its burden of proof.

An exception maybe

The decision was unanimous. Justice Samuel Alito wrote a concurrence in which he pointed out that a trial court may refuse to accept an inconsistent verdict, but doing so is not required under the Constitution.

Alito cracked the door on whether an exception exists or perhaps created an end-run around the issue. Would the court have ruled the same way had the trial judge rejected the inconsistent verdicts?

It’s unclear because neither the majority nor concurring opinions analyzed the issue. However, given the majority opinion’s rationale, a trial judge setting aside a verdict as “inconsistent” appears to be a difficult circle to square with the ruling in McElrath . Nothing the trial judge does in deciding a verdict is “inconsistent” differs from what the jury did in McElrath . The only difference between the two scenarios is the stage of the process.

Is an appellate court’s label of a verdict as “repugnant” really any different than Alito’s example? The trial judge labeling the verdict “inconsistent” still sets aside the jury’s acquittal.

McElrath reminds us the Double Jeopardy Clause is not focused on protecting the government’s case or on its ability to get a conviction; it is there to protect the jury’s decision that the governed have determined the government has not sufficiently proven its case, and a fellow citizen is therefore not guilty.

 

Christopher D. is a veteran criminal defense attorney practicing at Turner Padget’s office in Greenville, South Carolina.

 

Copyright © 2024 BridgeTower Media. All Rights Reserved.