THE STATE v. WIERSON
S24G1299
Supreme Court of Georgia
321 Ga. 597
PINSON, Justice.
FINAL COPY
Michelle Wierson was charged with vehicular homicide after she allegedly caused a fatal car accident while speeding. Before trial, two psychiatrists concluded that, at the time of the accident, Wierson lacked the mental capacity to tell right from wrong and suffered from a delusional compulsion that caused her to speed. Relying on those conclusions, Wierson filed notice of an intent to plead not guilty by reason of insanity. The State then moved to introduce evidence that, a few weeks before the accident, Wierson stopped taking some of her psychiatric medications. The trial court granted the State’s motion, but the Court of Appeals reversed in a pre-trial appeal, holding that evidence of medication non-compliance is not relevant to whether the statutory defenses of insanity are available to a defendant. We granted review to address that question, and also to reconsider Bailey v. State, 249 Ga. 535 (291 SE2d 704) (1982),
1. Background
(a) Wierson was charged with homicide by vehicle and reckless driving after she allegedly drove at high speed and struck another car, killing a passenger in the other car. Wierson had before been diagnosed with bipolar disorder, and at the jail after her arrest, she was described as being in a “manic state . . . exhibiting multiple symptoms of bipolar manic episodes.” She was soon released on bond to a mental-health facility for treatment and evaluation. The doctor who saw her there noted that Wierson’s prescribed treatment for her condition included at least four medications. But there was evidence that Wierson had stopped taking at least three of those medications several weeks before the accident.
After her release from the facility, Wierson was examined by two more psychiatrists, one hired by the defense and the other appointed by the court. The two psychiatrists concluded that, on the
Based on the psychiatrists’ conclusions, Wierson filed a notice of intention to plead not guilty by reason of insanity. Under the Georgia Code, a defendant can be found not guilty by reason of insanity if she qualifies for either of two statutory defenses, which we will refer to collectively as the “insanity-defense statutes.”1 The first, which is based on “mental incapacity,” provides:
A person shall be found not guilty of a crime if, at the time of the act, omission, or negligence constituting the crime, the person did not have the mental capacity to distinguish between right and wrong in relation to such
act, omission, or negligence.
A person shall be found not guilty of a crime when, at the time of the act, omission, or negligence constituting the crime, the person, because of mental disease, injury, or congenital deficiency, acted as he did because of a delusional compulsion as to such act which overmastered his will to resist committing the crime.
The State responded to Wierson’s insanity plea with a motion in limine to admit evidence that Wierson had stopped taking at least some of her prescribed medications. The State argued that if Wierson planned to mount an insanity defense, the jury should hear evidence that Wierson had voluntarily contributed to her mental state, “just as if the issue were voluntary intoxication or other voluntary incapacitation.” Wierson countered with a motion in limine to exclude any evidence of “medication non-compliance.” She contended
(b) The trial court granted the State’s motion to introduce evidence of medication non-compliance. The court explained that the question was novel in Georgia law. But it concluded that evidence of medication non-compliance was relevant to Wierson’s insanity defense, and that the probative value of the evidence was not substantially outweighed by the danger of unfair prejudice.
In an appeal before trial, the Court of Appeals reversed. See Wierson v. State, 372 Ga. App. 102 (903 SE2d 792) (2024).2 The court held that evidence of medication non-compliance should have been
Separately, the court held that evidence of medication non-compliance was not relevant to show Wierson’s intent to commit vehicular homicide and reckless driving — an argument that the State made for the first time on appeal. Wierson, 372 Ga. App. at 105 (1) (a), 111 (1) (b). The court reasoned that the charged offenses did not
The Court of Appeals then addressed the authority that the State relied on, most notably Bailey, 249 Ga. 535. Bailey involved a paranoid schizophrenic who, against his doctor’s advice, voluntarily entered a highly stressful situation, and then “overreacted” and killed two people. Bailey, 249 Ga. at 536-537 (1). This Court concluded in Bailey that a “delusional compulsion” defense was not “available” to the defendant because, even if he was suffering from such a delusion, he had “brought that delusion about” voluntarily. Id. at 537-538 (1). In this case, the State relied on Bailey and argued that Wierson similarly “brought [her] delusion about” by not taking her medication. But the Court of Appeals majority concluded that Bailey did not control because its holding was limited to its facts: “The holding in Bailey was simply that the particular facts of that
Judge Padgett dissented. The dissent agreed with the majority that the insanity-defense statutes do not create an exception for medication non-compliance or other self-inducement. See Wierson, 372 Ga. App. at 114. But the dissent believed that this case was controlled by Bailey, which recognized an exception to the insanity-defense statutes that applied to this case. See id. at 114-115.
We granted review to determine (1) whether evidence that a defendant voluntarily contributed to her mental state at the time of the crime is relevant to whether the statutory insanity defenses are available, and (2) whether Bailey should be reconsidered.
2. Analysis
(a) The Insanity-Defense Statutes
To start, let’s put aside Bailey for the moment and consider the statutory insanity defenses on their own. When we interpret a statute, we give the text its “plain and ordinary meaning” at the time it was enacted, Deal v. Coleman, 294 Ga. 170, 172 (1) (a) (751 SE2d 337) (2013) (citation and punctuation omitted), and we find that meaning by reading the relevant language “in its most natural and reasonable way, as an ordinary speaker of the English language would,” State v. Islam, 321 Ga. 30, 32 (912 SE2d 632) (2025) (citation and punctuation omitted). To that end, we must consider the text not by itself, but in the “context in which it appears,” id. (citation and punctuation omitted), including the surrounding statutory language, the statute’s structure and history, and other law that makes up the legal backdrop against which the language was enacted. See State v. Harris, 319 Ga. 665, 667 (906 SE2d 402) (2024). We also have a set of rules and presumptions to help us identify the most reasonable meaning from among the possible meanings. Among these canons of construction, we have said that we generally should avoid a construction that would make some statutory language “mere surplusage,” Middleton v. State, 309 Ga. 337, 342 (3) (846 SE2d 73) (2020) (citation and punctuation omitted). And, just as important — and it should go without saying — we may not read into a statute language that the General Assembly did not enact. See,
With those principles in mind, we turn to the statutory insanity defenses. The plain language of those statutes says that a defendant is not guilty if, “at the time of the act, omission, or negligence constituting the crime,” she lacked the mental capacity to distinguish right from wrong or was under a delusional compulsion that made her unable to resist committing the crime.
The absence of any such language is especially notable when the insanity-defense statutes are considered in their relevant context. See Harris, 319 Ga. at 667. Those statutes are part of Article 1 of Chapter 3 of Title 16 of the Georgia Code, which deals with “Defenses to Criminal Prosecutions” that are based on the defendant’s “Responsibility.” Within Article 1, the Code section right next door to the insanity-defense statutes establishes a defense based on the defendant’s intoxication. See
If that were not evidence enough that these statutes do not take away a person’s insanity defense if someone “brings about” those mental states “voluntarily,” consider the legal backdrop against which these statutes were enacted. See Summerlin v. Ga. Pines Cmty. Serv. Bd., 286 Ga. 593, 594 (2) (690 SE2d 401) (2010) (“The General Assembly is presumed to enact all statutes with full knowledge of the existing condition of the law and with reference to it.“). These statutes were enacted in their current form in 1969. See Ga. L. 1968, pp. 1250, 1270, § 1 and Compiler’s Note. Before that, their predecessor statute also provided a legal defense for those
A lunatic or person insane, without lucid intervals, shall not be found guilty of any crime or misdemeanor with which he may be charged, provided the act so charged as criminal was committed in the condition of such lunacy or insanity; but if a lunatic has lucid intervals of understanding, he shall answer for what he does in those intervals as if he had no deficiency.
Code Ann. 1933 § 26-303 (emphasis added). See also, e.g., Code Ann. 1882 § 4296; Code Ann. 1860 § 4192; Penal Code of 1817, Div. I, Sec. V (Ga. L. 1816, p. 143). Like the current statutes, the former law was explicit that the key question was the defendant’s mental capacity at the time of the crime. And the decisional law applying those old Code sections likewise focused on the defendant’s mental capacity at the time of the crime, without regard to how it came about.
The State points out that certain Court of Appeals decisions have generally authorized juries to consider evidence of the defendant’s actions and mental state before the crime. But those decisions merely held that evidence of the defendant’s behavior before the crime (and during and after the crime) could be relevant to the question of whether the defendant in fact had the relevant mental state “at the time of” the incident — whether lacking the mental capacity to tell right from wrong or under a delusional compulsion. See, e.g., Wilson v. State, 9 Ga. App. 274, 281 (70 SE 1128) (1911) (“Whether an act was caused by a diseased mind is to be determined primarily from the indicia presented by the act itself, and then from the results of an examination of the physical, moral, and mental condition of
In short, the plain language of these statutes, their context, and their long history all align: the insanity defenses are available even to a person who has “voluntarily” induced the relevant mental state. And applied to this case, that would mean that whether Wierson stopped taking her medication some weeks before the accident is not relevant to whether the statutory insanity defenses are available to her.
(b) Reconsidering Bailey v. State
But we cannot stop there. As we mentioned earlier, one of our decisions, Bailey, is in conflict with this otherwise straightforward conclusion that the insanity-defense statutes do not make the defenses unavailable to a person who voluntarily induced the relevant mental state before the crime at issue was committed. That conflict was highlighted by the Court of Appeals below: the majority distinguished Bailey and held that its exception did not apply to Wierson’s medication non-compliance, while the dissent would have held that Bailey controlled, making the insanity defenses unavailable in this case. So we turn to Bailey now, addressing first the disagreement below about whether it controls this case, and then whether it should be reconsidered.
(i) Bailey involved a defendant with paranoid schizophrenia who, against his doctor’s orders, put himself into a highly stressful situation and ultimately killed two people. Bailey, 249 Ga. at 537-538 (1). Bailey contended that he shot the victims while suffering under a delusional compulsion, see id. at 536 (1), and so he tried to
This Court affirmed that decision. In doing so, we acknowledged that, under our precedent, the statutory defense of delusional compulsion is available if there is evidence “that the defendant was laboring under a delusion, that the act itself was connected with the delusion and furthermore that the delusion would, if true, justify the act.” Bailey, 249 Ga. at 537 (1) (citation and punctuation omitted). But then we took another step: without reasoning or precedent in support, we declared that the “necessary implication” of the insanity-defense statutes was that “a chronic paranoid schizophrenic may no more voluntarily and intentionally induce his delusion than a chronic alcoholic voluntarily may induce his drunkenness then expect the homicide to be excused rather than criminal.” Id. (citing Code Ann. 1933 § 26-704, predecessor to
(ii) The question whether a precedent controls a decision in a later case turns on the scope of the relevant holding of that precedent. In a system of precedent, courts are bound to stick to and apply our past decisions rather than deciding each case on a blank slate. See Wasserman v. Franklin County, 320 Ga. 624, 645 (II) (B) (1) (911 SE2d 583) (2025). Courts “apply” those past decisions by discerning the reasoning that was necessary to their outcomes and using the same reasoning (often distilled into rules of decision or legal principles, standards, or tests) in the cases before them. That reasoning that was necessary to the past decision is, speaking generally, its holding. See Holding, Black’s Law Dictionary (12th ed. 2024) (“[a] court’s determination of a matter of law pivotal to its decision; a
Pinpointing the holding of a past decision is more art than science. There exists a range of views on how to define a holding as a general matter. See Garner at 45-46 (discussing how “commentators and judges don‘t uniformly define what counts as a holding“). And even if we can agree to define a holding generally as the reasoning necessary to a decision, figuring out what reasoning is truly “necessary” can be tricky, particularly when the reasoning set out in an opinion is wide-ranging (which parts were really necessary?) or ambiguous (what exactly was the reasoning?) or even implicit (what were they thinking?). One judge‘s holding may be another‘s dicta. Compare, e.g., Smith v. State, 236 Ga. 5, 10 (6) (222 SE2d 357) (1976)
But one point of relative agreement is that a holding must be something more than the result of the case given its precise facts. See Seminole Tribe of Florida v. Florida, 517 U.S. 44, 67 (II) (B) (116 SCt 1114, 134 LE2d 252) (1996) (“When an opinion issues for the Court, it is not only the result but also those portions of the opinion necessary to that result by which we are bound.“). Were it otherwise — if the only binding feature of past decisions was that their particular result is mandated given an identical set of facts — no precedent would be truly binding on future courts and litigants. After all, no two cases are precisely the same, and the universe of factual circumstances is infinite. And indeed, when courts “distinguish” past precedents, they do not look for just any facts that are different from
This is where the Court of Appeals went wrong in reading Bailey. The court concluded that Bailey did not control the decision whether one of the insanity defenses was available to Wierson here because “[t]he holding in Bailey was simply that the particular facts of that case did not justify a jury charge on delusional compulsion.” Wierson, 372 Ga. App. at 108-109 (1) (a). As we just explained, that “facts plus result” view of a holding is too narrow. The Bailey Court announced and applied a clear (if unsupported) rule: the insanity defenses are not available to someone who “brought about” or “induced” a delusion “voluntarily” or with some degree of “premeditation.” Bailey, 249 Ga. at 537-538 (1).
(iii) Having now determined that the insanity-defense statutes cannot be construed to incorporate Bailey‘s holding that those statutory defenses are not available to a person who induces the relevant mental state, and that Bailey controls this case, we must decide whether to keep following Bailey.
“When we consider whether to follow one of our past decisions, stare decisis is the strong default rule.” Wasserman, 320 Ga. at 645 (II) (B) (1) (citation and punctuation omitted). As we have explained before, a system built on following precedent rather than arbitrary discretion not only keeps the body of law more stable, predictable, and reliable, but also promotes and preserves the rule of law. See id. In rare cases, however, following a past decision “would do more harm to the rule of law than overruling it would.” Johnson v. State, 315 Ga. 876, 887 (3) (885 SE2d 725) (2023).
Applying those considerations here, we conclude that Bailey must be overruled. Cases that are “unreasoned,” or that “disregard[ ] the basic legal principles that courts use to do law,” are “ripe for overruling,” because leaving apparently arbitrary or policy-driven decisions in place can be “especially harmful to the rule of law.” Wasserman, 320 Ga. at 645-646 (II) (B) (1) (citation and punctuation
Bailey is not saved by its status as a statutory-construction precedent. It is true that leaving a wrong decision of statutory construction in place may be relatively less harmful to the rule of law than declining to disturb a bad constitutional construction precedent: because it is generally easier to revise a statute than it is to
[w]e have a duty to ascertain the meaning of the statutory law, and we must endeavor to do so in a way that is consistent with the familiar and settled principles of statutory interpretation. Sometimes we may get it wrong, and yet, if we have made our best effort, it may be more appropriately left to the General Assembly to set things right. But before we call it a day and declare our judicial work at an end, we ought to try at least once to undertake the sort of careful textual analysis (including a consideration of relevant context) that, if done properly, would reveal the most natural and reasonable understanding of the statute. . . . “We ought not follow unreasoned precedent without reason.”
Finally, a look at the practical consequences we have considered in assessing stare decisis does nothing to save Bailey. We are aware of no “reliance interests” that have built up around Bailey‘s judge-made exception to the insanity-defense statutes, nor can we imagine that citizens make decisions about their behavior based on that exception. See Wasserman, 320 Ga. at 647 (II) (B) (1). Nor has Bailey become “deeply entrenched” in our law, see id. To the contrary, as far as we can tell, the decision has been cited in only eight other appellate opinions (before this case) since it issued in 1982, and only one of those opinions, a concurrence, referred to the holding at issue here. See VanVoorhis v. State, 234 Ga. App. 749, 751 n.3 (507 SE2d 555) (1998) (Beasley, J., concurring). So these considerations do not cut against overruling Bailey either.
For these reasons, stare decisis does not preserve Bailey‘s hold-
(c) Application
We can now return to Wierson‘s case. Given our conclusions above, resolving this case is straightforward. Wierson pleaded not guilty by reason of insanity, and she put up evidence — the two psychiatrist reports — that, at the time of the accident, she lacked the mental capacity to tell right from wrong and also suffered from a delusional compulsion. Under
Two final points. First, the State made an additional argument
Second, on a related note, our conclusion here does not foreclose the admission of evidence of medication non-compliance for all purposes when a defendant pleads not guilty by reason of insanity. For example, as we noted above, evidence that a defendant was not following her medical course of treatment before an alleged offense might be admissible to show that, at the time of the offense, she lacked mental capacity or suffered from a delusional compulsion —
3. Conclusion
In sum, we ultimately agree with the Court of Appeals that evidence of Wierson‘s medication non-compliance was not admissible to show that she “voluntarily” induced her lack of mental capacity or delusional compulsion, because the statutory insanity defenses are available without regard for whether that was true. We also agree with the Court of Appeals that Bailey does not compel a different conclusion, but for a different reason than the Court of Appeals gave. Contrary to that court‘s view, Bailey would control here. But it was wrongly decided, and today, after considering stare decisis, we overrule its holding that created a judge-made exception to the statutory insanity defenses. Finally, we do not reach the remaining issues decided by the Court of Appeals in Case No. A24A0241.
PETERSON, Chief Justice, concurring specially.
I agree with much of what is said in the majority opinion. I agree with the majority opinion‘s construction of the insanity-defense statutes. I agree that our invention of an exception to those statutes in Bailey v. State, 249 Ga. 535 (291 SE2d 704) (1982) was error. And I agree that we should affirm the judgment of the Court of Appeals.
Where I part ways with the majority opinion is what to do with Bailey. The majority opinion defines Bailey‘s holding broadly such that it would control this case, and then proceeds to overrule Bailey. But the majority opinion‘s definition of Bailey‘s holding is unnecessarily broad; in my view, Bailey‘s holding is reasonably understood to be narrow enough that it does not apply here.
The majority opinion frames the holding of Bailey as rendering the insanity defenses unavailable “to a defendant who intentionally
Read in that light, I understand Bailey‘s holding as this: a defendant may not voluntarily and intentionally cause a state of mind that the defendant knew may well result in criminal activity and then be relieved of criminal responsibility because of the
Accordingly, I would arrive at the same conclusion as the Court of Appeals that Bailey‘s holding does not apply to this case (albeit for somewhat different reasons), and thus I cannot join the majority opinion, although I do concur in the judgment.
I am authorized to state that Justice Colvin joins in this concurrence.
Certiorari to the Court of Appeals of Georgia — 372 Ga. App. 102.
Sherry Boston, District Attorney, Samuel R. D‘Entremont, Thomas L. Williams, Ellie M. Harris, Assistant District Attorneys, for appellant.
Peters Rubin Sheffield & Hodges, Robert G. Rubin; Garland Samuel & Loeb, Kristen W. Novay, for appellee.
Justin T. Moore; Devin A. Rafus, Lauren B. Shubow, Amanda J. Walker, Hunter J. Rodgers; Cory H. Isaacson, Matthew R. Segal, amici curiae.