# Committee Paper > Georgia Prisoners' Speak Committee paper  |  Prepared for the House Blue-Ribbon Study Committee on Criminal Post-Conviction Litigation  |  September 2026 ← All committee materials  •  Download the … **Published**: 2026-09-08 **Source**: https://gps.press/brc/committee-paper/ **Author**: Georgia Prisoners' Speak --- Georgia Prisoners' Speak Committee paper | Prepared for the House Blue-Ribbon Study Committee on Criminal Post-Conviction Litigation | September 2026 --- [← All committee materials](https://gps.press/brc/) • [Download the package (PDF)](https://gps.press/wp-content/uploads/2026/09/GPS-September-Package-2026-09.pdf) # The evidence comes last ## Why Georgia's four-year habeas deadline should go, and why a lawyer alone would not fix it **Georgia Prisoners' Speak · The GDC Accountability Project, Inc. · September 2026** *Prepared for the House Blue-Ribbon Study Committee on Criminal Post-Conviction Litigation, and for our readers. The supporting paper, "Four years, thirty minutes," and the model bill follow this paper and carry the full authority for everything in it. A short note on other issues we found, none of them our ask, closes the package. The fifty-state survey the papers draw on is supplied separately.* --- ### What we're asking Much of this Committee's work has been on ineffective assistance of counsel: where that claim should be raised, whether the motion for new trial is the right place for it, and whether the person raising it should have a lawyer. Those are the right questions. The changes under discussion would help, and we support them. We're writing about something next to them. Since 1967, every constitutional claim that survives a direct appeal has had one door in Georgia, and that door is habeas corpus. If the Committee moves ineffective-assistance claims out of the motion for new trial and into habeas, which is where the rest of those claims already go, then whatever it builds will be received by a proceeding that runs on a four-year clock nothing stops. The reforms before you decide where a claim is heard. The deadline decides whether it can be heard at all. That's the adjacent issue this paper is about. The Supreme Court of Georgia has already asked the General Assembly for this kind of help, and said these rules are the legislature's to change.[1](#fn:1) So we're asking for one change alongside the Committee's own. Repeal the four-year deadline on habeas corpus petitions, O.C.G.A. § 9-14-42(c), and make merit the test for whether a claim gets heard. That is a single ask with two halves, and the rest of this paper explains why each half is needed and why the alternatives don't reach the problem. ### What a deadline assumes Every filing deadline rests on the same assumption: that on the day the clock starts, the person could find out what happened to them if they tried. For most legal claims, that's fair. For this one it isn't, because of what these claims are made of. A constitutional violation in a criminal trial is usually something the State did and nobody told the defendant about. Evidence that would have helped him, sitting in a file he never saw. A jailhouse witness paid in a way the jury never heard. A rape kit that a police officer kept and never turned over to the prosecutor, so that the man convicted learns it exists only after years of records requests, each one answered months later, each answer pointing to the next. A forensic technique that sounded certain at trial and fell apart a decade later when somebody audited the lab. None of that is knowable at sentencing. It surfaces when a file is finally produced, when a scandal breaks, when a witness decides to talk. That schedule belongs to the State and to chance. It has nothing to do with four years. The record bears this out. People exonerated in the United States in 2024 had lost an average of thirteen and a half years to wrongful imprisonment, and those cases typically had lawyers, investigators, innocence organizations and laboratory testing behind them.[2](#fn:2) Georgia's own cases show what the schedule looks like from the inside. Clarence Harrison was told in the early 1990s that the evidence in his case had been destroyed; a slide from the rape kit turned up years later, and DNA excluded him seventeen years in.[15](#fn:15) Devonia Inman's mask carried another man's DNA when it was finally tested a decade after his conviction, and it took most of another decade, and a habeas court's finding that police records about that man had been withheld, before he walked out.[16](#fn:16) Dennis Perry's jury never heard that the witness against him had been paid twelve thousand dollars; DNA freed him after twenty years.[17](#fn:17) Joey Watkins's conviction became final in 2003. What overturned it was a juror's private experiment during deliberations that nobody outside the jury room knew about. His petition was filed in 2017, and the Supreme Court of Georgia affirmed his relief in 2022, twenty-one years after conviction, after a lawyer, an innocence organization and two trips to that Court.[4](#fn:4) Sonny Bharadia served nearly twenty-three years before DNA testing excluded him from the gloves the perpetrator wore, and the Court held the delay against him anyway.[3](#fn:3) In each of these the State held the fact that mattered, and the person it mattered to had no way to reach it. Read quickly, those five names could suggest the system works, only slowly. They're the exceptions, and they share a shape. Each case had DNA, or a fact as hard as DNA, and each man found people willing to believe him and to press a claim of actual innocence for years. That's what Georgia's remaining routes are built for. An extraordinary motion for new trial needs newly discovered evidence the defendant couldn't have found with due diligence, evidence "so material it would probably produce a different verdict," and evidence that does more than impeach a witness.[18](#fn:18) The habeas statute's own exception for a "miscarriage of justice" has "always been interpreted as a very narrow exception tied to evidence of actual innocence," reaching the person who, in the Court's words, "is not even culpable in the circumstances under inquiry."[19](#fn:19) Those are tests for proving a man didn't do it. Most people have no laboratory result to bring to them, and never will. A constitutional claim is a different thing, and it shouldn't have to carry that weight. The Constitution guarantees the process, and a conviction won by hiding evidence from the defense, or decided by a juror on something never put in evidence, is unconstitutional whether or not the man did it. Georgia's habeas statute was written for exactly that claim. It opens the writ to anyone who asserts "a substantial denial of his rights under the Constitution of the United States or of this state," and it says nothing about innocence.[21](#fn:20) Yet when the four-year clock runs out on a claim like that, there's no extraordinary motion to fall back on, because the claim isn't new evidence of innocence, and no miscarriage-of-justice exception to reach, because it isn't about innocence at all. For every name above there are people with a real constitutional claim and no test result to attach to it. For them the deadline is the end of it. ### What it takes to find out Suppose a man does start to suspect something. Here is what the State gives him to work with. Today he has no lawyer. Georgia appoints no counsel in habeas, and the Supreme Court of Georgia has said that changing that "rightfully belongs to the General Assembly."[5](#fn:5) The Committee is weighing exactly that for ineffective-assistance claims, and we hope it does. It wouldn't change what follows. A lawyer appointed on an ineffective-assistance claim works that claim and is gone when it's decided. The claim we're describing surfaces later, and it surfaces to a man on his own. However counsel is provided, the first job stays where it has always been: recognizing that something in his own trial was unconstitutional, naming it correctly, and showing a court there's merit to it. That is his to do. He does that work in the prison law library, and the Department's own rule guarantees him "at least 30 minutes" at a computer, in an amount the librarian sets "based on the number of computers and the number of offenders requesting access."[6](#fn:6) Thirty minutes a week is what people inside report. The rule fixes a length and says nothing about frequency. Consider what has to happen inside those thirty minutes. The research runs through a legal search program. Before he can use it he may have to learn to use a computer. Then he has to learn the program, which is its own problem, before he starts on the law. There are no books to fall back on. Most Georgia prisons emptied their print law collections long ago. Everything else moves by mail. A trial transcript, a police file, a lab record: each is a written request and a wait measured in months. And the waits don't run alongside each other. They run one after another, because from a cell you often can't find out who holds a record until somebody answers and tells you. Each answer buys the next question. Someone on the outside makes five calls in an afternoon. Someone inside spends a year on the same five questions, and only if every one of them gets a reply. If the prison goes on lockdown, the library closes and the mail slows. The four-year clock doesn't stop for any of it. So the State sets a deadline for a discovery it also controls the means of making. That is the heart of it. ### Why "just give him a lawyer" doesn't solve it The Committee's answer, and the natural one, is to appoint counsel. We support that. It still doesn't reach this problem, for three reasons. **A lawyer arrives too early to find late evidence.** Counsel appointed in year two can read the trial record carefully. He can't find a document the State hasn't produced yet, or a lab audit nobody has run. Watkins's claim didn't exist in any findable form in 2003. No appointment in 2003 would have found it. **A fixed fee doesn't buy an investigation.** Finding a concealed violation means records requests, tracking down witnesses years later, sometimes paying an expert to re-examine evidence. That's an investigative budget. An appointment paid to review a record buys record review. The lawyer working inside that budget often won't have the means to go looking, and won't always recognize what he's looking at, because the science that convicted his client may have moved since the trial. **And a person can't ask for a lawyer until he knows what to ask about.** Any right to counsel attaches to a claim someone has already identified. Recognizing the claim comes first, alone, under the conditions above. That is the step the deadline consumes. Counsel is a companion to repeal. It isn't a substitute for it. A committee that recommends counsel and stops has given a lawyer to a person whose door has already closed. ### Why merit should decide, and why the statute has to say so There's a second half to the ask, and it's the half that keeps the first from being undone. Georgia already bars second habeas petitions. Under § 9-14-51, any ground not raised in the first petition is waived unless a judge finds it "could not reasonably have been raised" the first time. That exception is the whole protection, and it turns on a judge's view of what was reasonable for this petitioner. The Supreme Court of Georgia has said the timeliness test and the successive-petition test involve "the same basic analysis: whether a petitioner has acted in a reasonable and diligent manner to uncover the legal or factual grounds."[7](#fn:7) Now watch what appointing a lawyer does to that analysis. Today a man who filed alone can argue he couldn't reasonably have found what he had no means to look for. Give him a lawyer on his ineffective assistance claim, let him lose, and the State's answer to his next petition writes itself: you had counsel, and counsel should have found it. The deeper problem isn't which way a court would rule on that. It's that we'd be relying on a court to rule the right way at all, and Georgia's post-conviction statutes are full of exceptions that sound like doors but don't open. Equitable tolling is the clearest case. In 2020 the Supreme Court of Georgia looked for any Georgia precedent applying it and reported it found none. It then declined to create one, saying that would mean inventing "for the first time in Georgia law" an equitable remedy against a limitation "enacted by the General Assembly."[8](#fn:8) The statutory exceptions have done little better. Across every Georgia appellate decision from 2006 to 2026 that engages § 9-14-42, petitioners invoked the statutory doors in six cases in twenty years. The door opened at the timeliness stage twice. Relief came through it once, in *Watkins*.[9](#fn:9) One exception was closed by construction rather than disuse: in 2012 the Court read § 9-14-42(c)(3) to be structurally impossible, reasoning that a right can't be both newly recognized and already retroactive, and reversed a habeas grant on that basis. All the Justices concurred.[10](#fn:10) That's the pattern. An exception that depends on a court's discretion isn't a remedy a person can plan around, and it hasn't behaved like one here. So the answer isn't to write another discretionary exception and hope it's read generously. It's to make merit the test. If a petitioner can show his claim has merit, there should be a hearing to evaluate it. **Georgia already uses that test. It just doesn't reach the door.** When a petitioner loses in the habeas court and asks the Supreme Court for permission to appeal, the Court has said the standard isn't discretionary: "If the Court determines … that a habeas case has arguable merit, then the Court has no discretion: the application must be granted."[11](#fn:11) The State already accepts that arguable merit compels review at that stage. We're asking that the same be true at the stage that decides whether anyone looks at the claim at all. It's the same principle in both places. A procedural rule shouldn't extinguish a claim nobody has examined. This is also why the fix has to come from the General Assembly. The Court declined to create a right to counsel in habeas and left that to the legislature. It declined to create equitable tolling and left that to the legislature. And in *Sanders* the Chief Justice was explicit that a limited right to counsel, habeas venue and the budget to support them are "the sort of thing that far exceeds the judicial power."[1](#fn:1) Twice the Court has held it can't do this. Once, with seven Justices joining, it has asked you to. ### The principle isn't new here The General Assembly has already decided that finality sometimes has to yield. The four-year bar doesn't apply to a person under sentence of death. A capital petitioner may file however many years have passed.[12](#fn:12) So nobody is being asked to accept a new proposition. Georgia has already agreed that in some class of case, getting the conviction right matters more than closing the file, and that no number of years is short enough to justify enforcing a judgment that shouldn't stand. The only question is where the line falls. Right now it falls at execution. A man serving forty years for something he didn't do gets four years to prove it. A man sentenced to die gets no limit at all. Nor is Georgia's position ordinary. It is one of four states with no entitlement to counsel at a first collateral review, with Virginia, Wyoming and Arkansas, which appoints only in capital cases. Eight states make appointment mandatory and twenty-one more require it once a stated condition is met.[13](#fn:13) And on the deadline itself, forty-six states either set no limitations period or let a court excuse a late filing. Georgia is one of four that do neither, and one of two of those that also provide no lawyer.[20](#fn:21) **Georgia's own habeas statute carried no filing deadline at all for the 141 years from the Code of 1863 until 2004.** ### What it costs Repeal costs the State nothing. A right to counsel needs an appropriation and someone to administer it. A tolling provision needs courts to litigate, case by case, whether each petitioner's excuse qualifies. Removing a limitation period creates no proceeding, appoints nobody and funds nothing. What it leaves is a hearing on the merits, which is the thing the deadline was built to avoid. The petitioner still carries the burden of proof. The State still answers, and the State still holds the trial record, the transcript and its own files, which is more than the petitioner ever had. If the claim has merit, the conviction was unconstitutional, and the prejudice from the delay fell on the man who served the years while the fact stayed hidden, not on the State that hid it. Georgia decided every habeas petition that way, with no deadline, for the 141 years before 2004.[14](#fn:14) ### The ask, restated **Repeal the four-year deadline at § 9-14-42(c), and make merit the test for whether a claim is heard.** 1. **Repeal the deadline.** A claim shouldn't die because of when the evidence surfaced. 2. **Hear a second petition where the petitioner shows merit.** Not where a judge can be persuaded the claim was unreasonable to have found earlier, which is discretion again, but where there's a showing worth evaluating. If counsel is provided for ineffective assistance claims, this matters more, not less. A counseled loss on those claims shouldn't waive a constitutional claim that surfaced afterward. The first half opens the door. The second keeps it from being closed by a rule about how someone arrived at it. The full supporting paper follows, revised from the version submitted to the Committee in August. Afterwards we present a model bill as the solution, and then the note on other issues. --- ### Notes --- 1. *Sanders v. State*, No. S26A0222 (Ga. Mar. 3, 2026) (Peterson, C.J., concurring, joined by Warren, P.J., and Bethel, McMillian, LaGrua, Colvin and Pinson, JJ.). A concurrence, not an opinion of the Court, and joined by seven of nine Justices. Treated at length in the supporting paper, § VI. [↩](#fnref:1)[↩](#fnref2:1) 2. National Registry of Exonerations, 2024 Annual Report (April 2025): average years lost to wrongful imprisonment by persons exonerated in 2024. [↩](#fnref:2) 3. *Bharadia v. State*, 297 Ga. 567 (2015). The opinion records that "none of the DNA recovered from the gloves matched appellant's DNA," which "revealed the DNA of an unknown male and an unknown female," and holds that the Court of Appeals did not abuse its discretion in finding he had not shown due diligence in obtaining the testing. [↩](#fnref:3) 4. *Watkins v. Ballinger*, 308 Ga. 387 (2020) (petition not time-barred under § 9-14-42(c)(4); dismissal reversed and hearing ordered); relief affirmed, *Ballinger v. Watkins*, 315 Ga. 369 (2022). Joseph Samuel Watkins was convicted in Floyd County in 2001. His 2017 petition raised juror misconduct: during deliberations a holdout juror conducted her own timed drive to test the State's cell-phone timeline, against the court's instructions, and changed her vote to guilty. Counsel learned of it years later. The State abandoned the retrial in September 2023. [↩](#fnref:4) 5. *Gibson v. Turpin*, 270 Ga. 855, 857 (1999), a 4 to 3 decision: "It is well settled that there is no federal or state constitutional right to appointed counsel in Georgia habeas corpus proceedings." On the statutory question, "A law requiring appointed counsel for capital habeas petitioners is not constitutionally compelled, and therefore, the decision to create such a law rightfully belongs to the General Assembly." [↩](#fnref:5) 6. Georgia Department of Corrections Standard Operating Procedure 227.03, "Access to Courts," effective June 30, 2020. The rule sets a minimum length and is silent on frequency; thirty minutes a week is reported practice, not the text. The same rule forbids using the printed legal collection while using the electronic law library. Full treatment in the supporting paper, § I-A. [↩](#fnref:6) 7. *Watkins v. Ballinger*, 308 Ga. 387 (2020), construing the diligence standard across § 9-14-42(c)(4) and § 9-14-51 together. [↩](#fnref:7) 8. *Stubbs v. Hall*, 308 Ga. 354 (2020). The petitioner "does not point to any Georgia precedent in which this Court has endorsed or applied a doctrine of equitable tolling"; the Court found "only one case in which this Court even discusses" it, a class action in which the doctrine was not applied; creating the remedy would mean acting "for the first time in Georgia law" against a limitation "enacted by the General Assembly," and the Court declined. [↩](#fnref:8) 9. GPS study of § 9-14-42 in the Georgia appellate record, 2006 to 2026: 76 decisions read in full, every classification checked against the stored opinion. These are rates in the visible record. Unpublished denials of a certificate of probable cause are not part of it, so the figures describe the decisions the public record shows, not everything petitioners tried. [↩](#fnref:9) 10. *State v. Sosa*, 291 Ga. 734 (2012), construing § 9-14-42(c)(3). The habeas court had granted relief; the Court reversed, all Justices concurring. [↩](#fnref:10) 11. *Redmon v. Johnson*, 302 Ga. 763 (2018), describing the certificate-of-probable-cause standard under § 9-14-52. Cited for what the standard is, not for how often it opens: in the same opinion the Court noted it has "denied thousands of such applications in the past (while granting a few each year, including two today)," and those denials are unpublished. [↩](#fnref:11) 12. O.C.G.A. § 9-14-42(c) applies "within four years in the case of a felony, other than one challenging a conviction for which a death sentence has been imposed or challenging a sentence of death." [↩](#fnref:12) 13. GPS fifty-state survey, counsel at first collateral review, every cell verified against a primary source and coded under a stated rule: eight mandatory, twenty-one conditional, seventeen discretionary, four none (Arkansas capital-only, Georgia, Virginia, Wyoming). Coding artifact: `research/counsel-coding-2026-09-01.md`. [↩](#fnref:13) 14. Supporting paper, § VII. Repeal touches only § 9-14-42(c). The petitioner's burden of proof, the certificate of probable cause at § 9-14-52 and the successive-petition rule at § 9-14-51, as amended by the model bill that follows, all remain. The State's prejudicial-delay defense at § 9-14-48(e) applies by its own terms only to convictions had before July 1, 2004; the 2004 Act replaced it with the deadline for everyone convicted after, and this paper does not propose reviving it. Procedural default at § 9-14-48(d) is not addressed here. [↩](#fnref:14) 15. Clarence Harrison, DeKalb County. Convicted March 18, 1987, of rape, robbery and kidnapping; sentenced to life plus twenty years. In the early 1990s he was told that all the evidence in his case had been destroyed. A later search by the Georgia Innocence Project found that at least one slide from the victim's rape kit still existed; DNA testing in 2004 concluded the DNA "could not possibly belong to the same man." Released August 31, 2004. Innocence Project, case profile, innocenceproject.org/cases/clarence-harrison; Georgia Innocence Project, georgiainnocenceproject.org/freed-client/clarence-harrison-2. [↩](#fnref:15) 16. Devonia Inman, Cook County. Convicted in 2001 of the 1998 Taco Bell murder in Adel and sentenced to life without parole. About a decade later the Georgia Innocence Project found the killer's makeshift mask in the clerk's office; the GBI crime lab found one person's DNA on it, Hercules Brown's. A motion for new trial was denied, and in 2014 the Supreme Court of Georgia declined to hear the appeal. On the habeas petition filed in 2018, Judge Kristina Cook Graham found in November 2021 that prosecutors had failed to disclose Brown's September 2000 arrest, at which police found a homemade mask like the one from the murder; the trial prosecutor had told the jury there was "not one scintilla of evidence" tying Brown to the crime. Charges dismissed and Inman released December 20, 2021, after twenty-three years. Atlanta Journal-Constitution, "Devonia Inman freed after 23 years in prison for wrongful conviction," Dec. 20, 2021; Georgia Innocence Project, georgiainnocenceproject.org/freed-client/devonia-inman; Death Penalty Information Center, "Georgia Man Exonerated 23 Years After Wrongful Capital Murder Conviction." [↩](#fnref:16) 17. Dennis Perry, Camden County. Convicted of the 1985 murders of Harold and Thelma Swain at Rising Daughter Baptist Church, largely on the testimony of a witness who, the defense was never told, had been paid $12,000. DNA testing of hairs found in the hinge of a pair of glasses left beside the victims matched a different man, Erik Sparre. Conviction vacated July 17, 2020; charges dismissed July 19, 2021. Georgia Innocence Project, "Dennis Perry Exonerated After 20 Years of Wrongful Imprisonment"; Death Penalty Information Center, "DNA Exonerates Georgia Man Who Had Waived His Appeals to Avoid Wrongful Execution." [↩](#fnref:17) 18. O.C.G.A. § 5-5-41; *Timberlake v. State*, 246 Ga. 488, 491 (1980), as restated in *Smith v. State*, No. S25A0548 (Ga. Oct. 15, 2025): the movant must show "(1) the new evidence was unknown to him at the time of trial; (2) the evidence could not have been acquired sooner through the exercise of due diligence; (3) the evidence is so material it would probably produce a different verdict; (4) the evidence is not merely cumulative; (5) the witness's affidavit has been obtained or its absence accounted for; and (6) the evidence serves a purpose beyond impeaching the credibility of a witness." *Bharadia*, note 3, was decided on the diligence requirement of that route: the DNA excluded him, and the motion failed anyway. [↩](#fnref:18) 19. *Perkins v. Hall*, 288 Ga. 810, 824 (2011), construing the "miscarriage of justice" exception to procedural default at § 9-14-48(d) and quoting *Valenzuela v. Newsome*, 253 Ga. 793, 796 (1985): the term "is by no means to be deemed synonymous with procedural irregularity, or even with reversible error. To the contrary, it demands a much greater substance, approaching perhaps the imprisonment of one who, not only is not guilty of the specific offense for which he is convicted, but, further, is not even culpable in the circumstances under inquiry." [↩](#fnref:19) 20. GPS fifty-state survey, the time limit by instrument, every cell verified against a primary source: eleven states set no limitations period on the route a conviction challenge travels; thirty-five set a period a court may excuse on good cause, a rebuttable presumption, a showing of innocence or equitable tolling; four set a period that cannot be excused (Georgia, South Dakota, Virginia, Washington). Of those four, Georgia and Virginia also provide no counsel. The full record is at gps.press/post-conviction-fifty-states-data/. [↩](#fnref:21) 21. O.C.G.A. § 9-14-42(a). The section that carries the four-year deadline in subsection (c) opens, in subsection (a), with the ground for the writ: a person "who asserts that in the proceedings which resulted in his conviction there was a substantial denial of his rights under the Constitution of the United States or of this state may institute a proceeding under this article." Innocence is not an element. [↩](#fnref:20) --- Georgia Prisoners' Speak is the public voice of The GDC Accountability Project, Inc., a Georgia 501(c)(3) nonprofit. Corrections: [accountability@gps.press](mailto:accountability@gps.press).