Court case over fatal car crash raises issues of mental health and criminal liability

Release time：2024-05-17 13:21:09 Source：Global Gesture news portal

ATLANTA (AP) — No one disputes that Michelle Wierson crashed her SUV into a car stopped at a traffic light, causing the death of a young boy.

But while prosecutors say she needs to 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 DeKalb County, Georgia, neighborhood in her Volkswagen Tiguan in September 2018, she believed she was on a God-assigned mission to save her daughter from being killed.

On her way to her daughter’s school, she was traveling at full speed when she hit a Toyota Corolla stopped at a traffic light, forcing it into the intersection, where it collided with another car. Five-year-old Miles Jenness, who was riding in the Toyota, sustained a traumatic brain injury and a severed spine and died days later.

An Atlanta-area psychologist with a years-long history of bipolar disorder, Wierson has pleaded not guilty by reason of insanity to charges of vehicular homicide and reckless driving.

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