# Model Bill > Georgia Prisoners' Speak Model bill, September revision  |  Prepared for the House Blue-Ribbon Study Committee on Criminal Post-Conviction Litigation  |  September 2026 ← All committee materials  •… **Published**: 2026-09-08 **Source**: https://gps.press/brc/model-bill/ **Author**: Georgia Prisoners' Speak --- Georgia Prisoners' Speak Model bill, September revision | 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 Habeas Corpus Restoration Act ## Model bill: September 2026 revision *This text is the published bill (v4, gps.press, August 2026) with one addition: a new Section 6 amending Code Section 9-14-51 so that a ground omitted from a first petition is heard on a showing of arguable merit. Legislative Finding (13) is new for the same reason. The title clause, the cross-references, the summary table and the section numbering are conformed. Nothing else in the published text is changed.* **Subtitle for the page:** *Correcting Ourselves: Removing the 2004 Deadline from Georgia's Habeas Corpus Statute, and Letting Merit Decide* > **NOTE:** This is model legislation prepared for legislative sponsors. When filed, the Georgia Office of Legislative Counsel will assign an LC number and format the bill according to its internal conventions. Legislative findings (Section 2) will appear in the session law but are not codified in the O.C.G.A. --- ``` [Session Year] LC [Assigned by Legislative Counsel] House Bill ___ By: Representatives [Sponsors to be identified] A BILL TO BE ENTITLED AN ACT To provide for a short title; to provide for legislative findings and determinations; to amend Code Section 9-14-42 of the Official Code of Georgia Annotated, relating to grounds for writ of habeas corpus, waiver of objection to jury composition, time limitations, and notice, so as to repeal the limitation periods for the filing of petitions set forth in subsection (c) of said Code section and the notice requirement of subsection (d) of said Code section; to provide for applicability to petitions without regard to the date of conviction; to provide for the refiling of petitions previously dismissed as untimely; to amend Code Section 9-14-51 of the Official Code of Georgia Annotated, relating to the effect of failure to raise grounds for relief in an original or amended petition, so as to provide that a ground not so raised shall be heard in a subsequent petition upon a showing of arguable merit; to provide for construction and coordination with other laws; to provide for severability; to provide for an effective date; to repeal conflicting laws; and for other purposes. BE IT ENACTED BY THE GENERAL ASSEMBLY OF GEORGIA: ``` --- ## SECTION 1. SHORT TITLE This Act shall be known and may be cited as the "Habeas Corpus Restoration Act." --- ## SECTION 2. LEGISLATIVE FINDINGS AND DETERMINATIONS The General Assembly finds and determines that: **(1)** Georgia's habeas corpus statute descends from the Code of 1863. Section 3909 of that Code provided that "[a]ny person restrained of his liberty, under any pretext whatever" might "sue out a writ of habeas corpus, to inquire into the legality of such restraint." **For the 141 years from that Code until 2004, the statute carried no filing deadline.** Every time limit in the 1863 habeas title ran against the custodian, whose return was due within twenty days, and none ran against the prisoner. **(2)** The lineage Georgia's Code cites for the writ reaches the Habeas Corpus Act of 1679, printed in Cobb's 1851 Digest at the very pages the history line of Code Section 9-14-1 still cites. That Act answered even a prisoner's willful delay of two full court terms only by denying him a hearing in vacation time; **it never took the writ away.** The 2004 deadline does what Parliament in 1679 declined to do. **(3)** The Habeas Corpus Act of 1967 made the writ the exclusive remedy for constitutional claims surviving direct appeal. It expanded the writ to any "substantial denial" of state or federal constitutional rights; declared, in the findings still carried at Code Section 9-14-40, that "the scope of state habeas corpus be expanded"; and narrowed the extraordinary motion for new trial to exclude constitutional claims, as the Supreme Court of Georgia confirmed in *Mitchum v. State*, 306 Ga. 878 (2019). **Since 1967, every post-appeal constitutional claim has had one door, and that door is habeas corpus.** **(4)** In 2004, the General Assembly imposed the first filing deadline ever placed on the writ under Georgia's general habeas corpus statute: four years in the case of a felony and one year in the case of a misdemeanor. Ga. L. 2004, p. 917. (The only earlier limitation touching habeas corpus in Georgia is the 180-day provision of Code Section 40-13-33, enacted in 1986 and confined to challenges to misdemeanor convictions of the traffic laws; this Act does not disturb it.) **(5)** The four-year period yields to nothing. In *Stubbs v. Hall*, 308 Ga. 354 (2020), the Supreme Court of Georgia held the period subject to neither statutory nor equitable tolling, and held that the statute provides no remedy when a sentencing court fails to give the warning subsection (d) of Code Section 9-14-42 requires. In *State v. Sosa*, 291 Ga. 734 (2012), a habeas court granted relief, and the grant was reversed solely because the petition was untimely. **A limitation period presumes that the person subject to it had a fair opportunity to act before it closed. Under current law, no Georgia court is permitted to ask whether that premise held.** **(6)** The persons subject to the period are, in the ordinary case, imprisoned, unrepresented, and opposed by the State. There is no right to counsel in a Georgia habeas proceeding. In 58.4 percent of the habeas cases disposed of by the superior courts in calendar years 2021 through 2025, the petitioner had no lawyer, against a statewide self-represented rate of 27.7 percent across all case types; the respondent warden is represented by the Attorney General, on whom every petition from a person in Department of Corrections custody is served under Code Section 9-14-45. Department of Corrections Standard Operating Procedure 227.03 allots a requesting person "at least 30 minutes" of electronic law library access, in an amount determined by "the number of computers and the number of offenders requesting access." And the United States Department of Justice's findings report of October 1, 2024, found correctional officer vacancy rates of roughly 50 percent systemwide, exceeding 70 percent at ten of the State's largest facilities: the staffing on which every library call-out and escorted movement depends. **(7)** The deadline extinguishes the oldest class of claim the writ reached. Code Section 17-9-4, enacted in the Code of 1863 and never amended, declares a judgment void for want of jurisdiction "a mere nullity"; Georgia's courts route that claim to habeas corpus on precedent, *McDonald v. State*, 126 Ga. 536 (1906), reaffirmed in *Harper v. State*, 286 Ga. 216 (2009), holding the writ available "at any time thereafter." Habeas hears the claim unwaived, *Tolbert v. Toole*, 296 Ga. 357, 361 n.8 (2014), but only in a timely petition, and the companion routes close faster: a motion in arrest of judgment must be made within the term of court (Code Section 17-9-61), and an extraordinary motion for new trial cannot carry a constitutional claim. **The result since 2004 is that an unlawful sentence is correctable forever, while an unlawful conviction is correctable for four years.** **(8)** The General Assembly has already determined that correcting a wrongful conviction may outweigh the interest in repose. Subsection (c) of Code Section 9-14-42 exempts from its periods any petition "challenging a conviction for which a death sentence has been imposed or challenging a sentence of death." **The principle is therefore established in the very subsection this Act repeals; the only question is where the line falls.** It presently falls at execution: a person serving a term of years has four years in which to act, while a person sentenced to die is subject to no deadline at all, and no one describes the capital habeas docket as disordered by the absence of one. **(9)** The statutory accrual triggers of subsection (c) are narrow in operation. The late-discovery trigger of paragraph (c)(4) has been cited in eight decisions in the twenty-two years since its enactment, two of them the same litigation at two stages; it is a trigger and not a tolling rule, as the Supreme Court of Georgia cautioned in *Stubbs*; and the petitioner it saved in *Watkins v. Ballinger*, 308 Ga. 387 (2020), required counsel, an innocence organization, and two appearances before the Supreme Court of Georgia across twenty-one years. The miscarriage-of-justice sentence of subsection (d) of Code Section 9-14-48 addresses procedural default, and no Georgia court has held that it reaches a petition dismissed as untimely. Persons exonerated in the United States in 2024 lost an average of 13.5 years to wrongful imprisonment (National Registry of Exonerations, 2024 Annual Report), ordinarily with professional assistance no unrepresented prisoner possesses. **(10)** Georgia is a national outlier. Eleven states impose no post-conviction limitations period at all, and thirty-five more set a period that a court may excuse. Only four states run a deadline that cannot be excused for any reason: **Georgia, South Dakota, Virginia, and Washington.** Of those four, only Georgia and Virginia also provide no counsel at a first collateral review. The federal system's one-year period is tolled while a properly filed state petition is pending, is subject to equitable tolling under *Holland v. Florida*, 560 U.S. 631 (2010), and yields to an actual innocence gateway under *McQuiggin v. Perkins*, 569 U.S. 383 (2013). Georgia's four-year period has none of the three. **(11)** The State does not measure the outcomes of these proceedings. The Judicial Council's *Annual Report: Georgia Courts* carried the Supreme Court's dispositions of habeas certificate-of-probable-cause applications through its FY2013 volume, reporting data through calendar year 2012; in that final published year the grant rate was 2.0 percent, down from 10.0 percent in 2007. The Administrative Office of the Courts confirmed in writing in August 2026 that it does not collect data regarding case outcomes. Denials of further review issue by unpublished order in "thousands" of cases (*Redmon v. Johnson*, 302 Ga. 763 (2018)), so no public record supplies what the State does not collect. **(12)** Repeal removes a clock, not a screen. Procedural default under subsection (d) of Code Section 9-14-48; the certificate-of-probable-cause requirement of Code Section 9-14-52; the petitioner's burden of proof; and, for convictions final before July 1, 2004, the State's prejudicial-delay defense under subsection (e) of Code Section 9-14-48 all survive this Act untouched. The successive-petition rule of Code Section 9-14-51 survives as amended by Section 6 of this Act. **Georgia had every one of these protections, and no deadline, for the whole of its history before 2004.** **(13)** The successive-petition rule of Code Section 9-14-51 waives every ground not raised in an original or amended petition unless a judge finds the ground "could not reasonably have been raised" earlier. That exception is discretionary, and the Supreme Court of Georgia has held that it involves "the same basic analysis" as the timeliness inquiry this Act repeals: "whether a petitioner has acted in a reasonable and diligent manner to uncover the legal or factual grounds." *Watkins v. Ballinger*, 308 Ga. 387 (2020). A repeal of the deadline that left that discretionary test in place would reopen one door and leave the next one closed by a rule about how the petitioner arrived at it. The General Assembly further finds that Georgia law already supplies a non-discretionary standard for whether a habeas claim deserves to be examined: on an application for a certificate of probable cause, "If the Court determines … that a habeas case has arguable merit, then the Court has no discretion: the application must be granted." *Redmon v. Johnson*, 302 Ga. 763 (2018). **This Act applies that same standard to the question whether a ground omitted from a first petition is heard at all.** A ground shown to have arguable merit that has never been adjudicated on its merits should be heard, and should not be extinguished by a rule about when it was raised. **(14)** The General Assembly has twice in recent memory corrected post-conviction error by statute, unanimously. House Bill 176 (2025), restoring the out-of-time appeal that *Cook v. State*, 313 Ga. 471 (2022), had eliminated, passed the House 168-0 and the Senate 51-0 and was signed on May 14, 2025. The Wrongful Conviction and Incarceration Compensation Act, signed the same day, set compensation for wrongful incarceration at $75,000 per year. **Self-correction is possible, bipartisan, and recent.** **(15)** Habeas corpus reform is already before the General Assembly at the request of the Supreme Court of Georgia. In *Sanders v. State*, No. S26A0222 (Ga. Mar. 3, 2026), a concurrence joined by seven of the nine Justices encouraged the General Assembly to revisit the rules governing post-conviction review, observing that "virtually all of the rules our decisions set up are simply creatures of decisional law," and that a limited right to counsel in habeas, habeas venue, and the resources to support them are "the sort of thing that far exceeds the judicial power." **(16)** This Act creates no proceeding, appoints no one, and funds nothing. And the rule of decision is one the General Assembly gave long ago, at Code Section 9-2-3, unchanged since the Code of 1863: **"For every right there shall be a remedy; every court having jurisdiction of the one may, if necessary, frame the other."** --- ## SECTION 3. REPEAL Code Section 9-14-42 of the Official Code of Georgia Annotated, relating to grounds for writ of habeas corpus, waiver of objection to jury composition, time limitations, and notice, is amended by repealing subsections (c) and (d) in their entirety, so that the Code section shall read as follows: "9-14-42. (a) Any person imprisoned by virtue of a sentence imposed by a state court of record 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. (b) The right to object to the composition of the grand or trial jury will be deemed waived under this Code section unless the person challenging the sentence shows in the petition and satisfies the court that cause exists for his being allowed to pursue the objection after the conviction and sentence have otherwise become final." ## SECTION 4. APPLICABILITY **(a)** This Act shall apply to any petition for a writ of habeas corpus filed on or after its effective date, and to any petition pending on that date, whatever the date of the conviction or sentence challenged. No petition shall be dismissed, and no ground barred, for failure to file within the periods formerly set forth in subsection (c) of Code Section 9-14-42, whether or not those periods expired before the effective date of this Act. **(b)** Except as provided in Sections 3, 5 and 6 of this Act, nothing in this Act shall limit any defense, bar, or requirement provided by law, including the provisions of Code Sections 9-14-48 and 9-14-52. ## SECTION 5. REFILING OF PETITIONS PREVIOUSLY DISMISSED AS UNTIMELY; NEW CODE SECTION Article 2 of Chapter 14 of Title 9 of the Official Code of Georgia Annotated is amended by adding a new Code section to read as follows: "9-14-42.1. (a) A petition under this article dismissed before the effective date of this Code section solely on the basis of the limitation periods formerly set forth in subsection (c) of Code Section 9-14-42 may be refiled as to any ground that was not adjudicated on the merits. The refiled petition shall be filed as a new petition in the court having venue under Code Section 9-14-43 and shall be treated in all respects as an original petition, except as provided in subsection (b) of this Code section. (b) A petition refiled under subsection (a) of this Code section shall not, by reason of the prior dismissal alone, be barred by Code Section 9-14-51 or by res judicata; and the petition so dismissed shall not be deemed the petitioner's original or amended petition for purposes of Code Section 9-14-51. (c) A petitioner described in subsection (a) of this Code section whose application for a certificate of probable cause, or whose appeal, from the dismissal is pending on the effective date of this Code section may elect to dismiss the application or appeal and refile under subsection (a) of this Code section; and a refiling under subsection (a) of this Code section while such an application or appeal is pending shall operate as a dismissal of the application or appeal. A denial of a certificate of probable cause to appeal a dismissal described in subsection (a) of this Code section is not an adjudication on the merits for purposes of this Code section." ## SECTION 6. SUBSEQUENT PETITIONS; GROUNDS NOT PREVIOUSLY RAISED HEARD ON A SHOWING OF ARGUABLE MERIT Code Section 9-14-51 of the Official Code of Georgia Annotated, relating to the effect of failure to raise grounds for relief in an original or amended petition, is amended by striking the Code section in its entirety and inserting in lieu thereof a new Code section 9-14-51 to read as follows: "9-14-51. (a) All grounds for relief claimed by a petitioner for a writ of habeas corpus shall be raised by a petitioner in his original or amended petition. (b) A ground not so raised shall be heard in a subsequent petition, and shall not be deemed waived, if: (1) The Constitution of the United States or of this state otherwise requires; or (2) The petitioner shows that the ground has arguable merit and has not been adjudicated on the merits in any prior proceeding. (c) In determining under paragraph (2) of subsection (b) of this Code section whether a ground has arguable merit, the court shall apply the standard applied by the Supreme Court of Georgia in determining whether an application for a certificate of probable cause presents a case of arguable merit under Code Section 9-14-52, and shall make that determination on the petition, the record of the prior proceedings, and any showing the petitioner offers in support of the ground. A ground found to have arguable merit shall be heard on the merits, and the court shall not dismiss the subsequent petition, or deny the ground, by reason only that the ground could have been raised in the original or amended petition or that the petitioner was represented by counsel in a prior proceeding. (d) In all cases a ground asserted in a subsequent petition shall be heard where necessary to avoid a miscarriage of justice. (e) Nothing in this Code section shall be construed to limit the defenses available to the respondent under Code Section 9-14-48 with respect to a ground heard under this Code section, except that the omission of the ground from the original or amended petition shall not, of itself, constitute a failure to comply with Georgia procedural rules within the meaning of subsection (d) of Code Section 9-14-48. (f) A ground that was adjudicated on the merits in a prior proceeding under this article shall not be relitigated in a subsequent petition except as the Constitution of the United States or of this state otherwise requires." ## SECTION 7. CONSTRUCTION **(a)** Nothing in this Act shall be construed to limit or modify the rights established by Code Section 5-6-39.1, the miscarriage of justice provision of subsection (d) of Code Section 9-14-48, or the void judgment provisions of Code Section 17-9-4. **(b)** Nothing in this Act shall be construed to affect the limitation provided by Code Section 40-13-33 on challenges to misdemeanor convictions of the traffic laws. ## SECTION 8. SEVERABILITY If any provision of this Act or its application to any person or circumstance is held invalid by a court of competent jurisdiction, such invalidity shall not affect other provisions or applications of this Act that can be given effect without the invalid provision or application. To this end, the provisions of this Act are declared severable. ## SECTION 9. EFFECTIVE DATE This Act shall become effective on July 1 immediately following its enactment. ## SECTION 10. REPEALER All laws and parts of laws in conflict with this Act are repealed. --- ## THE HABEAS CORPUS RESTORATION ACT: SUMMARY | What it does | Where | | --- | --- | | Repeals the four-year (felony) and one-year (misdemeanor) filing deadlines on habeas corpus, and the sentencing-court warning that existed only to announce them | § 9-14-42(c) and (d), repealed | | Applies to every petition filed or pending on the effective date, whatever the date of conviction, and forbids dismissal for a period that expired before the Act | Section 4(a) | | A petition dismissed solely as untimely, never decided on the merits, may be refiled as a new original petition in the court with venue; the prior dismissal is not a bar and does not count as the "original" petition | New § 9-14-42.1(a) and (b) | | A pending certificate application or appeal from such a dismissal: the petitioner elects to see it through or to dismiss it and refile | § 9-14-42.1(c) | | **A ground omitted from the first petition is heard in a second petition on a showing of arguable merit, the same standard the Supreme Court already applies to certificate applications; it cannot be denied only because it could have been raised earlier or because the petitioner had a lawyer before** | **New § 9-14-51(b) through (e)** | | A ground already decided on the merits stays decided | § 9-14-51(f) | | Every other screen survives: procedural default, the certificate of probable cause, the burden of proof, and the State's prejudicial-delay defense for pre-2004 convictions | Section 4(b); Finding (12) | | Costs nothing: no proceeding created, no one appointed, nothing funded | Finding (16) | > The two halves of the ask are in Sections 3 and 6. Section 3 removes the clock. Section 6 keeps the door from being closed by a rule about how the petitioner arrived at it. Georgia already uses the arguable-merit standard at the appellate stage (*Redmon v. Johnson*); Section 6 applies it at the stage that decides whether anyone looks at the claim at all. --- 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).