A Mississippi jury is tasked with determining if a man who has admitted to killing and decapitating his mother did so because he was insane when he committed the crime in 2018.

The Biloxi Sun-Herald reports that testimony in the trial of Terelle Johnson began in Stone County Tuesday. 

Johnson’s attorneys say their client should be acquitted, claiming he was not aware of his actions when he killed his mother, Sherry Johnson, in their Wiggins home.

Prosecutors, however, maintain that Johnson knew exactly what he was doing.

Officials say Johnson had confessed the day after his arrest, revealing that he beat and strangled his mother to death following a fight over credit cards, then used his hands and teeth to decapitate her.

When deputies arrived for a welfare check on June 6, 2018, Johnson claimed his mother was on a cruise, but they found her decapitated body in the yard and her head on the other side of a fence.

Blood was smeared across the walls and ceiling of her locked bedroom, where investigators also found two knives. The prosecution argued that Sherry Johnson had fought for her life.

Click here to read more about the trial as reported by the Biloxi Sun-Herald.