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.
The Mississippi Supreme Court, argues the motion, ignored such evidence. The rest of the motion delved into whether Gregg was properly sentenced.
A juvenile offender who is convicted of first-degree murder after July 1, 2024, may be sentenced to life imprisonment in the custody of the Department of Corrections if the punishment is so fixed by the jury. If the jury fails to fix the penalty at life imprisonment, the court shall fix the penalty at not less than twenty (20) nor more than forty (40) years in the custody of the Department of Corrections.
Section 2(b) does not state the juvenile can be sentenced to life without parole. Section 2(c) covers a juvenile convicted of capital murder:
(c) A juvenile offender who is convicted of capital murder after July 1, 2024, may be sentenced to life imprisonment in the custody of the Department of Corrections or life imprisonment without eligibility for parole in the custody of the Department of Corrections if the punishment is so fixed by the jury. If the jury fails to fix the penalty at life imprisonment or life imprisonment without parole, the court shall fix the penalty at not less than twenty-five (25) nor more than fifty (50) years in the custody of the Department of Corrections.
Gregg was convicted of first-degree murder. The Supremes opined in a curious manner about whether Gregg is entitled to life with parole:
Both provisions were enacted as part of the same amendment, address juvenile homicide sentencing, and both provisions appear in consecutive subsections. The legislature therefore clearly knew how to authorize “life imprisonment without eligibility for parole” when it intended that punishment, so its omission of that phrase from subsection (2)(b) is understood to be intentional. ¶52. The State’s interpretation relies on importing parole consequences from Section 47-7-3 into Section 97-3-21(2)(b). The Court declines to combine the two. The parole statute is the parole statute, and the sentencing statute is the sentencing statute. ¶53. In the juvenile-specific framework enacted in 2024, “life imprisonment” and “life imprisonment without eligibility for parole” must be given different meanings. For juvenile capital murder, the jury may choose either life imprisonment or life without parole. For juvenile first degree murder, the jury may choose life imprisonment, but the sentencing statute does not authorize life without parole. If the jury does not fix life imprisonment, the trial court must impose a term of twenty to forty years.
Curiously, the Court did not alter Gregg's sentence of life without parole. Gregg's lawyers jumped on this passage in their motion, arguing her sentence is illegal as they ask for a new sentencing.
Gregg asks the Court to vacate her conviction and remand for a new trial or remand for a new sentence "with a properly instructed jury."
Attorneys James Murphy, Bradley Clanton, and Lance Mixon represent Gregg.
17 comments:
Another bite at the apple.
Set her free and have her go live with Lindsay Clancy
If she would have committed this in a Blue city, she would have not been prosecuted at all. Blue cities love them some criminals.
Her attorneys appear to be trying to make this another Lindsay Clancy case. They are not denying she murdered her mother (she's convicted by her own personal flock camera) but they are saying she had some mental lapses that made her do it. But she's fine now. And wants out of jail. Or something like that.
Is this an advertising stunt? 3 Law Firms?
So if she does win another trial, and if the new jury also convicts her similarly, will she finally give up and realize that she killed her freaking mother and tried to kill her step-father?! She's a murderer and Mississippi is not too keen or murderers.
12:27 exactly. They've obviously been watching that case closely. The insanity claim is setting a bad precedent.
Odds anyone on the jury ever read Crime and Punishment?
They would both have to sleep with one eye open.
No female, either woman or girl, should ever be held accountable for her actions.
Giving a 14 year old life without the possibility of parole is WRONG!
7:35 so is murdering your mother.
Assuming she's 16 now, what's the purpose or expected outcome of incarceration for the next seventy years? Or IS there an expected outcome? Isn't sentencing supposed to be outcome based?
Manson's followers weren't treated as harshly. Not all of them, anyway.
Manson and his followers were sentenced to death by a California jury. The appellate courts commuted their sentences to life. Weak appellate courts are the problem. The jury system is America’s system. I don’t think the people of Rankin county care what weak liberal judges or foreigners on Facebook think about this case.
You post the same thing, the same way, in every JJ post about this certified monster. Your opinion sucks.
Carly Gregg never should have claimed--and pled--that she was (supposedly) "not guilty" and that "by reason of insanity". She murdered her mother, Ashley Smylie, and then tried to murder her step-father, Heath Smylie. The killing of her mother was absolutely murder. It was not an accident or self-defense. It was murder pure and simple. And Carly Gregg was the person who murdered her mother, Ashley Smylie. And Carly wanted to be found "not guilty" and that "by reason of insanity". Horrible. Carly Gregg knew exactly what she was doing when she murdered her mother and then tried to murder her step-father. And, remember, Carly Gregg was offered a plea deal and turned it down!
Given Miss Gregg's age, and the fact that her thinking was altered by prescription drugs, one would expect a lenient sentence. However, there is much hatred of potheads (which one dares not express, as I know from experience). And there is much hatred of teenage girls (which one is also forbidden to express). There are no acceptable outlets for those hatreds. (and being 60, I've gotten censured a bunch, when celebrating each among the bumper crop of Post-2020 dead druggies and cheerleaders from my old high school. Considering pharma profits and dead former-tormentors who were dumb-enough to believe "Safe & Effective!", I've had a great 5 years)
And then, along comes a teenage girl whose mother was punishing her for smoking pot. The severe sentence, if you ask me, reflects the court's/jury's pent-up resentment against druggies and teenage girls.
Obviously, the kid's mind was mush, at the time of the murder. But she won't get the benefit of the doubt, because she's the perfect target for all that pent-up hatred.
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