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Greetings, Court Fans!

The Nine issued another pair of unanimous decisions this week addressing questions other than whether Donald Trump “engaged in insurrection” after taking an oath as an “officer of the United States.”

• In Great Lakes Insurance SE v. Raiders Retreat Realty Co., LLC (No. 22-500), the Court held that choice-of-law provisions in maritime contracts are presumptively enforceable, rejecting a Third Circuit decision limiting their enforcement; and
• In McElrath v. Georgia (No. 22-721), the Court held that a jury verdict finding a defendant not guilty by reason of insanity constitutes an acquittal for double-jeopardy purposes, notwithstanding any inconsistency with the jury’s other verdicts.

Let’s start with marine insurance—an area dear to some of our partners’ hearts. (Indeed, dear enough that they filed an amicus brief for the American Institute of Marine Underwriters, which was cited in the Court’s decision.)

The case began, naturally, with a coverage dispute: Great Lakes, a German insurance company, insured a yacht owned by Raiders Retreat, a Pennsylvania business. The parties entered into a maritime contract with a choice-of-law clause—selecting federal admiralty law and, where federal admiralty law did not exist, New York law. The yacht ran aground, and Raiders Retreat filed a claim. Great Lakes denied coverage, however, claiming that Raiders Retreat had breached the insurance contract by failing to maintain certain safety features. When Great Lakes sought a declaratory judgment in the Eastern District of Pennsylvania confirming its denial of coverage, Raiders Retreat responded with counterclaims under Pennsylvania state law. The District Court dismissed the state-law counterclaims under the contract’s choice-of-law provision, but the Third Circuit reversed, holding that a state’s strong public policy could override the presumption of enforceability of choice-of-law provisions and instructing the District Court to determine on remand whether Pennsylvania’s policy in favor of holding insurers accountable for the bad-faith denial of claims was sufficient to override the provision in the Great Lakes policy. But before that could happen, Great Lakes asked the Supreme Court to take a look.

In a unanimous decision authored by Justice Kavanaugh, the Court reversed the Third Circuit’s decision. Justice Kavanaugh first articulated the longstanding rule that choice-of-law provisions in maritime contracts are presumptively enforceable. Though he recognized this presumption is subject to “certain narrow exceptions,” he found that existing exceptions were inapplicable and declined to recognize an “additional exception” for circumstances when “enforcing the law of the State designated by the contract would contravene the fundamental public policy of the State with the greatest interest in the dispute.” Relying in part on the AIMU amicus brief, Justice Kavanaugh noted that the proposed exception lacked “historical roots” and would undermine the important principle of uniformity in maritime law.

Justice Thomas joined Kavanaugh’s opinion in full, but concurred separately to more directly attack a 1955 precedent on which the Third Circuit had relied. In that case, Wilburn Boat Co. v. Fireman’s Fund Insurance Co. (1955), the Supreme Court held that maritime contracts are governed by applicable state law when no “established federal rule” of admiralty applies. While Justice Kavanaugh had brushed aside Wilburn Boat because it did not involve a choice-of-law provision, Justice Thomas urged “[l]itigants and courts” to recognize that “the decision is at odds with the fundamental precept of admiralty law”—uniformity—and to therefore limit its application to “inherently local” disputes.

While the Court made quick work of the Third Circuit’s decision in Great Lakes, it had even less trouble dispatching a Georgia Supreme Court decision in McElrath. There, the state supreme court reached the remarkable conclusion that a criminal defendant could be re-tried after being acquitted by a jury. In a brief unanimous opinion, the supreme Supreme Court, said, in essence, “No, that is very, very wrong.”

Context helps explain the Georgia court’s decision (but only a little). Damian McElrath killed his mother when he was 18 years old and suffering a mental breakdown. He had only been released from an involuntary mental-health commitment a week earlier and told police that he stabbed his mother because she had been poisoning him with ammonia and pesticides. The state charged McElrath with both malice murder and felony murder predicated on aggravated assault. The jury returned a split verdict, finding McElrath “not guilty by reason of insanity” on the malice-murder charge and “guilty but mentally ill” on the felony-murder charge. On appeal, the Georgia Supreme Court held that these verdicts were “repugnant” because they involved “affirmative findings” about McElrath’s mental state “that are not legally and logically possible of existing simultaneously. Instead of reversing the felony-murder conviction, however, the court vacated both verdicts and permitted McElrath to be retried. After McElrath argued on remand that the Fifth Amendment’s Double Jeopardy Clause precluded him from being retried for malice murder, the case returned to the Georgia Supreme Court. The court recognized that “[u]nder the general principles of double jeopardy, the not-guilty verdict “would appear to be an acquittal that precludes retrial” But it reasoned that, “[v]iewed in context alongside the verdict of guilty but mentally ill…the purported acquittal loses considerable steam.” In its view, because the verdicts were “repugnant,” they were essentially void and the situation was no different from “a situation in which a mistrial is declared after a jury is unable to reach a verdict.” (Two justices expressed some skepticism about this rationale but nevertheless concurred because “[t]his lingering doubt [was] not enough to justify dissenting from an otherwise unanimous Court.”)

Writing for another unanimous Court, Justice Jackson reaffirmed the bedrock rule that “[o]nce rendered, a jury’s verdict of acquittal is inviolate.” It does not matter whether acquittal reflects the jury’s determination that a defendant is innocent or if it is “the result of compromise, compassion, lenity, or misunderstanding of the governing law.” The Double Jeopardy Clause “prohibits second-guessing the reason for a jury’s acquittal” and of course prohibits a defendant from being charged and put in jeopardy again for the same offense. Here, under Georgia law, the jury’s verdict that McElrath was not guilty of malice murder by reason of insanity was unquestionably an acquittal, as it represented a “ruling that the prosecution’s proof is insufficient to establish criminal liability for an offense.” That the jury reached a conflicting determination on a different count was irrelevant, Justice Jackson insisted, because “[a]n acquittal is an acquittal.” Whether an acquittal has occurred for double-jeopardy purposes is a matter of federal law, and the only consideration is whether the jury determined that there was insufficient proof to establish criminal liability. Because the jury necessarily made that determination with respect to the malice-murder charge, the Double Jeopardy Clause bars retrial of McElrath on that charge.

The Court did not address two issues that turn more on state law. First, it expressly permitted the Georgia courts to “address as a matter of state law the status of McElrath’s vacated conviction for felony murder.” Second, it took care not to “address the Double Jeopardy Clause’s application to a trial judge’s rejection of inconsistent or incomprehensible jury findings under state law.” Writing separately, Justice Alito underscored this second caveat. He emphasized that McElrath’s case was not a close call because there was a not-guilty verdict followed by a judgment of acquittal on the malice-murder count. The situation could be different, however, if “a trial judge refuses to accept inconsistent verdicts and thus sends the jury back to deliberate further.” As Justice Alito noted, some states permit that practice and the Supreme Court has never expressed a view on it. He stressed that nothing in the Court’s decision here “should be understood to express any view about whether a not-guilty verdict that is inconsistent with a verdict on another count and is not accepted by the trial judge constitutes an ‘acquittal’ for double jeopardy purposes.”

That’s all for this week. We’ll be back when there are new decisions to address.