McElrath v. Georgia

In 2012, Damian McElrath killed his adoptive mother, Diane McElrath, in Georgia. He raised an insanity defense. The jury returned a split verdict: not guilty by reason of insanity on malice murder, but guilty but mentally ill on felony murder and aggravated assault. The Georgia Supreme Court vacated both verdicts as repugnant and allowed a full retrial. McElrath appealed, arguing that the Double Jeopardy Clause barred retrial on the acquitted charge. The U.S. Supreme Court unanimously ruled that the insanity acquittal constituted a final verdict for jeopardy purposes. Because the jury necessarily found the defendant lacked criminal responsibility, the state could not retry him on that charge even if the verdict was logically inconsistent with the guilty finding.

The United States Supreme Court reversed the Georgia Supreme Court in a unanimous 9-0 decision. Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson authored the opinion, holding that the not guilty by reason of insanity verdict was an acquittal for double jeopardy purposes and therefore barred retrial on that charge, regardless of any inconsistency with other guilty verdicts.

Whether the Double Jeopardy Clause of the Fifth Amendment prohibits a retrial on a criminal charge for which a jury has previously returned a verdict of not guilty by reason of insanity, when that verdict is deemed inconsistent with a simultaneous guilty but mentally ill verdict on another charge.

The decision reaffirmed the fundamental constitutional protection against double jeopardy, particularly in cases involving mental health defenses. It prevented prosecutors from using logically inconsistent verdicts as a loophole to retry defendants who have been acquitted. The ruling was praised by criminal defense and mental health advocacy groups for protecting the finality of acquittals and ensuring that individuals found not criminally responsible due to mental illness cannot face repeated prosecutions.