# Deaths in Custody

> Georgia Prisoners' Speak has independently tracked 1,778 deaths in Georgia state custody since 2020, including 78 deaths in the first four months of 2026 alone — a system operating under a U.S. Department of Justice finding of unconstitutional conditions. The GDC does not publicly release cause-of-death information; GPS classifications are based on independent investigation, family accounts, news reports, and public records, with the true homicide count significantly higher than confirmed figures. A pattern of evidence destruction, bureaucratic suppression, and systemic misclassification of deaths has shielded the state from accountability while families are left without answers.

**Published**: 2026-04-26
**Source**: https://gps.press/intelligence/issue/deaths-in-custody/
**Author**: Georgia Prisoners' Speak

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## Scale of Mortality: What GPS Has Documented

Georgia Prisoners' Speak has independently tracked 1,778 deaths in Georgia state custody from 2020 through April 26, 2026. In 2024 alone, GPS documented 333 deaths — the highest single-year total in the database — including at least 45 confirmed homicides. In 2025, GPS tracked 301 deaths, including 51 confirmed homicides, 6 suicides, 8 natural causes, and 5 overdoses. As of April 26, 2026, GPS has already recorded 78 deaths for the year, including 27 confirmed homicides — a pace that, if sustained, would exceed prior years.

These numbers are GPS's own, built through independent investigation. The GDC does not publicly disclose cause-of-death information. Many deaths in the GPS database remain classified as 'Unknown/Pending' not because causes are genuinely undetermined, but because GPS has not yet been able to independently confirm them through investigation. The true homicide count is significantly higher than confirmed figures. Any improvement in cause-of-death classification over time reflects GPS's expanding investigative capacity — not increased transparency by the state.

The scale of mortality is not an abstraction. In January 2026, four people died at Washington State Prison in a gang-related disturbance following the statewide rollout of a phone-blocking system. On April 1, 2026, coordinated gang violence erupted across the system simultaneously — stabbings confirmed at five facilities, life-flight helicopters dispatched to two — with the system remaining in statewide lockdown by mid-afternoon. The fourth inmate death at Hancock State Prison in 2026 was reported that same week. These are not isolated incidents; they are the predictable output of a system in structural failure.

## Cover-Up and Misclassification: The Hidden Death Toll

The U.S. Department of Justice's October 2024 investigation found that Georgia systematically underreports prison homicides. During the first five months of 2024, GDC officially reported only 6 homicides — while internal GDC incident reports documented at least 18 deaths classified as homicides during the same period. The DOJ found that deaths clearly identified as homicides in prison incident reports are listed as 'unknown' in official mortality data, sometimes for years. Two homicides from 2021 remained listed as 'unknown' in official data at the time of the federal investigation. The DOJ concluded: 'GDC's homicide-reporting practices shield the State from public accountability for homicides in the prisons.'

GPS's own investigation in February 2026 exposed a specific, documented instance of this suppression. GDC's own statistical report acknowledged 301 deaths in calendar year 2025, yet the official mortality name-and-date list — *Mortality Report-1.1.25-12.31.25 Name_Date* — contained only 295 names. Six people were counted as dead by the state's own statistics but left unnamed in its official records. GPS filed an Open Records Request on February 11, 2026, seeking the complete list of all 301 individuals, their GDC identification numbers, dates of death, facility locations, and cause-of-death classifications. On February 27, 2026, GDC Assistant General Counsel Timothy Duff responded with what GPS described as 'a masterclass in bureaucratic obfuscation,' declining to explain the discrepancy or identify the six unnamed dead.

The pattern extends to individual cases with documented forensic evidence. In one case under GPS investigation, an incarcerated individual died in September 2024 under disputed circumstances involving contradictory autopsy findings, a questionable suicide classification, evidence of restraint use, and allegations of evidence suppression by officials. A family member has formally requested a coroner's inquest. In a separate 2025 case, GPS obtained autopsy findings documenting extensive subcutaneous hemorrhaging and bruising consistent with severe blunt force trauma and possible stab wounds through muscle tissue — on a death initially classified as suicide by hanging. These cases reflect a classification system that, as the DOJ found, systematically converts homicides into unknowns.

## Evidence Destruction and Obstruction of Accountability

The Georgia Department of Corrections has been judicially sanctioned for destroying evidence in a death case. In March 2026, Chief U.S. District Judge Leslie Gardner sanctioned GDC for destroying video footage of the 2022 fatal stabbing of Hakeem Williams at Valdosta State Prison, finding the department had acted in 'bad faith' and 'allowed the evidence to be destroyed while knowing that it needed to be preserved.' The judge cleared a civil case against former correctional officer Angela Butler for jury trial in Valdosta, holding GDC liable for any resulting verdict, and noted she would determine 'appropriate monetary sanctions' at the conclusion of the case. Butler had been sanctioned separately for lying under oath about Williams' death. Court records established that Butler had locked a handcuffed Williams in a cell with an unrestrained Jonathan Bivens — who then stabbed Williams to death with a 9-inch makeshift metal knife. Bivens is serving life without parole for murder.

This pattern of obstruction is not isolated to individual officers. The AJC documented in 2023 that GDC fought a DOJ subpoena for investigation records for six months, offering to release them only under a nondisclosure agreement — requiring a federal judge's order to compel production. In 2021, GDC blocked state lawmakers from entering Lee Arrendale State Prison citing 'security concerns' as legislators investigated allegations of inhumane treatment, inadequate medical care, and deaths of women held there. Families consistently report being left 'in the complete dark' about how their relatives died, a finding corroborated by the Human and Civil Rights Coalition of Georgia, which has independently tracked deaths and used open records requests to obtain GDC incident reports for grieving families.

The January 2026 death at a stripped cell — where staff reports indicated the incarcerated person died from cold or exposure while on what may have been a suicide watch — illustrates how individual deaths disappear into the system without accountability. The person's records were reportedly removed from the GDC offender database following a January 10, 2025 death at a women's facility; a family-posted article about that death was subsequently taken offline.

## Litigation and Settlements: The Financial Cost of Systemic Failure

The financial reckoning for Georgia's failure to protect incarcerated people is accumulating in federal courts. In April 2026, the state settled the wrongful death lawsuit brought by the family of David Henegar for $4 million — announced just over a week before trial was set to begin. Henegar, 44, was beaten to death over five hours at Johnson State Prison on October 16, 2021, by his cellmate Antone Hinton-Leonard while correctional staff ignored his cries for help and inmates banging on doors throughout the dorm. Henegar had reported to staff that he feared his cellmate, who suffered from severe mental illness and psychosis. His attorneys described the case as 'one of the largest settlements associated with the Georgia Department of Corrections.' His family's attorney Rachel Brady told the AJC: 'David himself asked the guard for help, and the guard told him to deal with it and then just moved on.'

In a separate verdict rendered on April 2, 2026, a federal jury returned a $307.6 million judgment against the corporate successor to Corizon Health for medical neglect of a colostomy patient in custody — among the most significant verdicts in the history of correctional healthcare litigation. The GPS settlements database also records a $12.5 million settlement and a previously documented $5 million settlement in the death of Thomas Henry Giles. These financial consequences are the direct output of a system the DOJ found in October 2024 to be operating in violation of the Eighth Amendment's prohibition against cruel and unusual punishment — documenting 142 homicides between 2018 and 2023, over 1,400 reported violence incidents in just sixteen months, gangs controlling housing units, broken fire alarms, padlocked cell doors, and staffing ratios as low as one officer per nearly 400 beds.

Despite these verdicts and settlements, the state has consistently denied wrongdoing in individual cases while the systemic conditions that produce the deaths remain unchanged. The defendants in the Henegar case denied any wrongdoing in court filings. The attorney general's office declined to comment on the Williams evidence destruction sanction. GDC deferred questions about the $4 million Henegar settlement to the AG's office, which also declined to comment.

## Systemic Drivers: Staffing, Gangs, and the Failure of Reform

Georgia's corrections crisis is not the result of an unmanageable population — it is the result of deliberate policy choices. The GDC and its legislative allies have consistently attributed rising violence to a more dangerous inmate population, pointing to a '12% increase in the proportion of the violent population since criminal justice reforms were undertaken in 2012.' The evidence does not support this framing. GPS's analysis documents that correctional officer positions remain 50–76% vacant system-wide, that the state has invested approximately $2.6 million in rehabilitation and education programming across two budget years against over $120 million in surveillance and technology — a 46-to-1 ratio — and that Georgia has no systematic gang separation housing policy, no structured gang renouncement program, and no dedicated operational strategy for managing rival factions despite having identified 315 gangs and validated approximately 15,200 people (31% of the population) as gang-affiliated — more than double the national average.

Georgia has invested approximately $50 million since 2024 in Managed Access Systems — technology designed to block contraband cell phones — through contracts with three vendors at 35 state prisons. GPS's investigation found that five days after GDC executed a statewide cutoff of the last remaining workaround in January 2026, four people died at Washington State Prison in a gang war. The technology the state calls 'contraband interdiction' has coincided with rising, not falling, homicide counts: GPS tracked 35 homicides in 2023, 45 confirmed in 2024 (with the true total estimated significantly higher), and 51 in 2025. The April 1, 2026 statewide lockdown — coordinated gang violence at multiple facilities simultaneously, including a high-ranking Blood leader stabbed in front of the warden at Hays State Prison — demonstrates that $50 million in phone-blocking technology has not addressed the structural conditions that produce violence.

The governance record is stark. Governor Brian Kemp's administration has added approximately $700 million to the corrections budget between FY 2022 and FY 2026, bringing annual spending to over $1.8 billion. Every measurable safety outcome has worsened over that period. Georgia's own 2012 justice reinvestment initiative — which reduced the prison population by 6%, avoided $264 million in projected costs, and reinvested $57 million in evidence-based programs without increasing crime — was systematically dismantled after 2019. The state now spends $1.8 billion annually to warehouse more than 52,000 people in facilities the federal government has declared unconstitutional, while spending $52 per person on rehabilitation.

## Families Without Answers: Individual Cases and Ongoing Investigations

Behind every statistic in GPS's database is a family left without answers. The family of Willie Andrew Willis Jr. has spent more than a year seeking information about how he sustained catastrophic injuries at Calhoun State Prison. Willis told family members he had been thrown from a balcony. Medical records list sepsis as the official cause of death, but the family reports that nearly an hour passed before he was airlifted for treatment despite being paralyzed from the waist down. The family has received contradictory accounts from prison staff and reports a complete absence of transparency from the institution.

At Hancock State Prison — which recorded its fourth inmate death of 2026 on April 8 with the death of Jacorey Pearson — the pattern is consistent: cause of death not released, body transferred to county coroner and GBI crime lab, investigation noted as 'ongoing' by the GDC Office of Professional Standards. On April 5, Ricky Mathis died at Baldwin State Prison under identical procedural circumstances. In both cases, GDC confirmed no signs of altercation — a designation that, given the DOJ's documented findings on misclassification, GPS treats as a starting point for investigation rather than a conclusion.

The January 10, 2025 death of a woman at a state women's correctional facility — officially listed as acute respiratory failure/possible drug overdose — illustrates additional layers of opacity. A source reported the death may have occurred at a different facility than official records indicate. The deceased's records were subsequently removed from the GDC offender database, and a family-posted article about the death was taken offline. GPS continues to investigate discrepancies between official mortality records and independently verified accounts, including the six individuals counted as dead in GDC's own 2025 statistics but left unnamed in the official mortality report.