Jackson Jambalaya

 After striking out in a bid to overturn her murder conviction, Carly Gregg wants another turn at bat.  

A Rankin County jury convicted Gregg of murder for killing her mother when she was 14 years old and sentenced her to life without parole.  Gregg appealed her conviction and sentence to the Mississippi Supreme Court.  The Court rejected her appeal last month.  

Undeterred, Gregg filed a motion for rehearing with the Mississippi Supreme Court yesterday.  

Rankin County Circuit Judge Dewey Arthur announced before trial he would not approve any continuances.  However, the Mississippi Supreme Court noted Gregg filed no motions for continuances, thus waiving such defense.  The motion takes exception to that holding and says Judge Arthur thus forced the defense to rush the mental health process as it prepared an insanity defense.  The Supremes held Gregg did not show how more time would have improved her insanity defense.  

The motion posits the Court is correct if the no-continuance statement is considered alone.  However, the policy compressed the defense process, depriving Gregg of a fair trial as it forced other errors.  

One such error was the portrayal of Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment.  Gregg's therapist testified for the prosecution Gregg read the book before killing her mother.  The main character in the book kills an old woman and feels no remorse for the murder.   Gregg argues the use of the book by prosecutors prejudiced the jury. The motion claims: 

Even though Kirk did not purport to give an expert sanity opinion, the jury could naturally attach clinical significance to a counselor's discussion of material recorded in psychological treatment notes. The prosecutor's chosen description did more than identify a book. It gave jurors a memorable narrative of calculated killing, a person labeled a "psychopath," a declaration of insanity, punishment, and unrepentance. That narrative mapped directly onto the very concepts the jury had to evaluate, while bypassing the safeguards and disciplined reasoning applicable to the competing psychiatric testimony.

Viewed alone, the Court found the literary evidence harmless. Viewed in context, it was the evidentiary culmination of the same mental-health process already affected by schedule pressure and premature compulsion. The defense was required to litigate sanity on the accelerated timetable; the State then received permission to rebut that defense not only with Dr. Pickett's clinical analysis, but also with a sensational fictional analogue that the Court agrees had little probative value. The errors thus did not merely coexist. The earlier procedural irregularities increased the significance of the later unfair evidentiary shortcut.

Note: I am working through the motion and updating this post as I do so.