SCOTUS hearing two criminal cases to start latest argument session

The Supreme Court is back to in-person work on Monday with the start of its final oral argument session for 2023.  And this one begins with two criminal cases over the first two days, as described in this SCOTUSblog post by Amy Howe:

The justices will kick off the December argument session on Nov. 27 with oral argument in a pair of consolidated cases, Brown v. United States and Jackson v. United States, involving the Armed Career Criminal Act.  The ACCA [provides a 15-year]  minimum sentence ... for an individual who had been convicted of a felony and possesses a firearm when that person has at least three “serious drug offenses.”  The question before the justices is how to define “serious drug offense” for purposes of the ACCA. Eugene Jackson and Justin Rashaad Brown argue that the definition should incorporate the federal drug schedules that were in effect either when the individual committed the federal firearm offense (Jackson) or at the time of sentencing for that offense (Brown), while the federal government argues that it should instead incorporate the schedules that were in effect at the time of the state drug offenses.

On Tuesday, the justices will confront double jeopardy issues in the case of Damian McElrath, a Georgia man who was found not guilty by reason of insanity on one murder charge arising from the stabbing death of his mother, while he was found guilty but mentally ill on a different murder charge (as well as an aggravated assault charge).  On appeal, the Georgia Supreme Court threw out both of the jury’s verdicts and sent the case back for a new trial on all charges. It concluded that the verdict was “repugnant”: McElrath’s acquittal on one murder charge required the jury to find that he was insane when he killed his mother, but he could only be convicted on the other charges if the jury found that he was not insane.

When the case returned to the lower court, McElrath argued that the Constitution’s ban on double jeopardy barred the state from trying him again on the murder charge on which he had been acquitted.  But the Georgia Supreme Court rejected that argument.  It explained that a “repugnant” verdict is essentially “void” and therefore does not create a double jeopardy problem.  McElrath renews that argument in the Supreme Court, while the state defends the Georgia Supreme Court’s ruling.  Under state law, Georgia contends, there was never a valid verdict in McElrath’s case, and he can therefore be retried.

UPDATE: I just noticed that LawProf Michael Dorf has this lengthy post about the ACCA cases, titled “Today at SCOTUS: Guns or Drugs?,” which makes some great statutory interpretation points.  Here is a taste:

Each of the briefs proceeds as though the rule it proposes is somehow dictated by the statutory text understood in light of well-accepted background understandings. In fact, however, it's perfectly clear that the statutory language, even read in light of those background understandings, is highly under-determinative as to the question presented.

In such cases, we are accustomed to the Justices indulging (whether or not consciously) their ideological priors. Here those priors are unclear. The more liberal Justices don't like guns but are probably inclined to think that Congress has over-criminalized drug offenses. The more conservative Justices are not especially troubled by drug criminalization; nor are their Second Amendment sensors likely to be activated by the "bad guy with a gun" scenarios these cases present