Carly Gregg, 15, is found GUILTY of murdering her mom in Mississippi after five-day trial

Carly Gregg has been found guilty of the murder of her mother and the attempted murder of her stepfather.

The 15-year-old cried as the jury delivered its verdict on Friday, just two hours after the jury stopped for deliberation.

She had previously turned down a 40-year plea deal offered to her by Mississippi prosecutors after they accused her of shooting her mother Ashley to death in their home on March 19.

Her legal team tried to argue that she was not guilty by reason of insanity.

The jury will now deliberate on whether she should spend the rest of her life behind bars without the possibility of parole.

Prosecutor Katherine Newman said: ‘Ladies and gentlemen, she is dangerous. She may look like a little girl, they may have said she is sweet little Carly, but unfortunately that is not true.

“We ask that you sentence Ms. Gregg to life imprisonment without the possibility of parole.”

Ms Newman told the jury that it was “scarier” for her “not knowing why” Gregg committed the crimes. She said: “If we don’t know why, what’s to say it won’t happen again?”

Gregg sobbed when Mrs. Newman asked her that question. She shook her head and mumbled the word “no.”

Earlier, her lawyer was seen comforting her and telling her “it’s going to be okay,” to which she replied “no, it’s not going to be okay.”

The court heard that Gregg, then 14, kept a diary in which she wrote down five “beliefs”, including: “God does not exist”, “heaven and hell are deceptive” and “control your own destiny”.

Mrs Newman on Friday drew the jury’s attention to the last two “beliefs” Gregg had written in her diary.

“These two stand out to me, ladies and gentlemen. She told us what her intentions were,” Newman said, holding a piece of paper as she read the last of the notes.

“You don’t need a family and it’s okay to be bad.”

Elsewhere in the diary, Gregg wrote, “I choose fire. It is powerful, beautiful, and deadly. These are the qualities I desire, so I choose fire.”

Gregg’s defense argued that the diaries paint a picture of a mentally ill child who repeatedly described in detail how much she struggled.

Forensic psychiatrist Dr. Jason Pickett told the jury he had interpreted the diaries differently in key expert testimony that unsettled the defense.

He wondered whether this was ‘a personal diary where someone wrote down things they really wanted to keep secret, or is this a budding, eloquent author writing things down for theatrical reasons?’

Carly was repeatedly described by witnesses as “gifted,” smart and intelligent.

Dr. Pickett read a piece Gregg had written about hearing voices, a complaint the teen had not previously discussed with her mental health professionals. He said he was “very skeptical” about it.

‘It seemed more theatrical and made something ridiculous. Patients who really suffer from this are tormented by it, it is quite painful for them. They don’t minimize it.’

Gregg’s legal team bases its defense on the claim that the teen was so plagued by voices, trauma and mental health issues that she withdrew and lost consciousness during the time the crimes were committed.

In their plea Friday, her lawyers said there was no doubt that Gregg loved her mother and stepfather.

The defense also noted that Gregg had no history of violence and that her actions on March 19 came as a shock to everyone who knew and treated her.

Her maternal grandparents have been by her side in court every day of the trial this week, and her stepfather has not abandoned her either.

When the audio played of her stepfather’s frantic phone call to police after he was shot, Gregg covered her ears with her hands and squeezed her eyes shut.

Defense attorney Bridget Todd said Gregg was convinced her father had both bipolar disorder and schizophrenia, and that she had developed a crippling fear of becoming like him.

“Carly worried about that all the time because her mother worried about that all the time too,” the jury heard.

‘Her mother often worried that Carly would develop the same mental illnesses as her father, because they are hereditary.’

Experts for the state question whether her father actually suffered from these mental illnesses, or whether he had symptoms that were a result of his drug addiction.

Both parties described Ashley as a “loving mother” whose world “revolved around Carly.”

“Carly was the love of her mother’s life,” they both said.

But Todd said Ashley was also overprotective, largely because she had already lost a child — a daughter who died years earlier from a health problem.

‘Do you really believe that a loving, overprotective mother… would prescribe antidepressants to her child when she herself was suffering from terrible side effects?

‘You can’t tell me that Ashley Smylie, as loving and protective as she was, would have taken that risk with Carly if she didn’t have to.

“This was not a bad child. This was not a child who was angry. This was not a child who had hatred in her heart for her mother or stepfather, it was the complete opposite. This was a child who was dealing with serious mental health issues. The same mental health issues that ran in her family and that we know are hereditary,” she said.

“This is a child who was compliant with the medication that she was given, but that medication… caused her symptoms to worsen. And while she was having a psychotic episode in an acute stress episode on March 19, she lost herself in what was the perfect storm.”

Gregg, who turned 15 in prison but was 14 at the time of the alleged crime, was smiling and giggling next to her attorney Thursday morning ahead of the state’s rebuttal, but within nine hours her entire demeanor had changed.

She was seen actively fighting back tears on Thursday afternoon after Dr. Pickett’s testimony.

Dr. Pickett was the prosecution’s key witness, and he tried to systematically dismantle the defense, one argument at a time.

He told the court he did not believe Gregg had bipolar disorder, saying his professional opinion was that she was of sound mind at the time of her mother’s death.

Dr Pickett said Gregg had ‘some psychopathic traits’ – a statement he ‘does not take lightly’.

“She’s charming and very nice,” he said. “I liked her when I did the interview. I don’t like to say things like that,” he said.

These statements were all disputed by the defense psychiatrist, Dr. Andrew Clark, who had previously testified that he had diagnosed her with bipolar II disorder.

He said he did not think Gregg “could understand the nature of her behavior and know the difference between right and wrong” at the time of the incident.