ATLANTA– No one disputes that Michelle Wierson crashed her SUV into a car stopped at a traffic light, killing a young boy.
But while prosecutors say she should be held accountable for her actions, her lawyers say her mental state at the time absolves her of liability. When Wierson sped through the streets of a neighborhood in DeKalb County, Georgia, in her Volkswagen Tiguan in September 2018, she believed she was on a God-assigned mission to save her daughter from death.
On the way to her daughter’s school, she was driving at full speed when she struck a Toyota Corolla stopped at a traffic light, causing it to enter the intersection and collide with another car. Five-year-old Miles Jenness, who was driving the Toyota, suffered a traumatic brain injury and a severed spine and died days later.
Wierson, an Atlanta-area psychologist with a longtime history of bipolar disorder, has pleaded not guilty by reason of insanity to charges of vehicular homicide and reckless driving.
Prosecutors want a judge to ban Wierson from using the insanity defense. But if that defense is allowed, they want to present evidence showing that she didn’t take all her medications. Defense attorneys argue that if the state succeeds, the insanity defense for this case and others would be completely destroyed.
The Georgia Court of Appeals, which will hear arguments in the case Wednesday, will decide whether Wierson’s attorneys can use the insanity defense at trial and, if so, whether the state can try to prove she was off her medication taken. .
Court records describe Wierson as enraged at the scene of the wreck, where she was arrested after throwing things at emergency workers and into the street. Witnesses said they believed Wierson was “under the influence of some intoxicant.” Her lawyers claim she suffered a psychotic episode that left her legally insane.
Robert Rubin, Wierson’s attorney, called the entire situation “a terrible tragedy.” His client, he said, is “haunted by the tragic consequences of her psychotic behavior, but it was entirely without any intention or moral culpability as she was mentally ill at the time.”
Bruce Hagen, an attorney representing the Jenness family in a separate civil case against Wierson, said his clients have “waited patiently for justice.”
“The Jennesses are truly interested in seeing that Ms. Wierson is held fully criminally responsible for Miles’ death,” Hagen said. “If the problem is that she deliberately stopped taking her medication, then their position is that she should not then benefit from claiming temporary insanity caused by the very predictable outcome of not taking her medication.”
There are two tests for insanity under Georgian law, both of which have to do with the mental state of the person “at the time of” the alleged crime. The first says that a person will not be found guilty of a crime if he “lacked the mental capacity to distinguish between right and wrong” in connection with the act. The second says that a person will not be found guilty of a crime if the person acted because of “a delusion” that “overpowered” her will.
Two experts – one hired by the defense and one hired by the court – found that Wierson met both criteria.
But prosecutors argue it doesn’t matter whether she could tell right from wrong. All that counts for a traffic violation is that Wierson drove in a manner that was against the law and caused the boy’s death, they say.
The delusion-coercion defense only applies if “the delusion is related to a fact that, if true, would have justified the act,” prosecutors wrote in a brief, adding: “Even under the most generous interpretation of (Wierson’s) report of a psychotic breakdown “She was not justified in recklessly operating a motor vehicle,” they wrote.
Therefore, her mental state is irrelevant, and her attorneys are simply “trying to evoke an emotional response and confuse the jury,” they wrote.
Wierson’s attorneys wrote in a brief that the state’s arguments conflict with Georgia case law, arguing that the state “still must prove that the driver’s actions were of his own volition and not an external factor who forced her to make a choice and overpowered her will. ” Every action Wierson took that day “was the result of her delusions and her inability to distinguish right from wrong,” her lawyers wrote.
If Wierson is allowed to pursue an insanity defense, prosecutors say they should be allowed to present evidence showing that she deliberately stopped taking her medications, making her psychotic breakdown “a reasonable and predictable consequence of her own actions.”
Wierson had been diagnosed with bipolar disorder in 2005 and was taking various medications, including lithium, according to the court. Urine and blood tests from the day of the crash showed she had not been taking the lithium as prescribed, and her brother said she had stopped taking it weeks before the crash, prosecutors wrote.
Evidence of Wierson’s medication levels will be critical to the jury’s assessment of her state of mind and the crux of her insanity defense, prosecutors argue.
Wierson’s lawyers argue that she has taken her medications properly. That the lithium was not detected is evidence that her dosage was too low, not necessarily that she did not take it as instructed, they wrote. But even if she had not taken her medications, “the law is clear that there is no exception to the insanity defense for medication or therapeutic noncompliance.”
Allowing evidence of medication compliance will “confuse the issues” and improperly lead the jury to judge Wierson based on her “conduct as a patient and not on her mental state at the time of the violation.”