Butts, Melvin

Tenure Summary

Melvin Butts entered the Georgia Department of Corrections payroll records in 2015 in a correction operations post (no facility attached to the annual record, salary $45,162.48), moved into business operations management in 2016 and 2017 ($47,492.34 and $48,732.48), and was promoted to Deputy Warden in 2018. The annual salary records show him holding the Deputy Warden title continuously from 2018 through 2025, with pay rising from $57,877.87 to $81,037.68. Facility-level records tie him to McRae Women's Facility specifically, where he appears as Deputy Warden on a dated roster entry of Nov. 22, 2023, in the 2025 and 2026 position records, and again on an Aug. 27, 2026 snapshot entry.

Per GPS's death attribution, five deaths occurred during his leadership tenure, all of them at McRae Women's Facility. No lawsuit naming Butts as a defendant appears in the records, no intel reports or intel events are dated inside his facility tenure, and no news coverage naming him was matched in the dataset. The causes of the five deaths are recorded only as cause classifications; no public narrative is attached to any of the five death records.

What happened on their watch

Pre-leadership roles (2015–2017; no facility attached). Butts is recorded in correction operations for 2015 and as Manager of Business Operations for 2016 and 2017.

Deputy Warden, 2018–2023 (annual salary records; no facility attached). The annual position records show the Deputy Warden title across these years without naming a facility, so no facility-specific events can be tied to them from this data.

Deputy Warden, McRae Women's Facility (facility-attached records from Nov. 22, 2023). All five deaths attributed to Butts' tenure occurred here. In chronological order per GPS death records: Jadia Corine Rozier, 23, on July 20, 2025, recorded under a different cause classification than the other four; Beverly Suzannne Sipple, 59, on March 16, 2026; Kristal Lyn Layne, 55, on May 10, 2026; Shannon Michelle Rush, 43, on May 16, 2026; and Chasity King, 26, on May 18, 2026. The decedents ranged in age from 23 to 59. Four of the five — Sipple, Layne, Rush and King — share the same recorded cause classification, and three of those four deaths fell within a nine-day span in May 2026. Each of the five carries `role_at_time` of Deputy Warden. The records include no allegations, incident reports or investigative findings tied to any of the five, and the public narrative field is empty for all of them.

Sources

• Georgia Prisoners' Speak personnel and payroll records — annual positions and salaries for Butts, 2015–2026, including facility-attached Deputy Warden entries at McRae Women's Facility
• Georgia Prisoners' Speak mortality records — five deaths attributed to Butts' McRae Women's Facility tenure (Rozier, Sipple, Layne, Rush, King), with dates, ages and cause classifications

Synthesized by GPS Intelligence System on Sep 23, 2026 from positions, attributed deaths, lawsuits, intel reports, and news mentions in the public corpus. The supporting data tables follow below.