Greetings:
This week Georgia started deciding what happens to people after they are convicted — in public, on a schedule, in rooms most people do not know exist.
A legislative committee is touring the state to rewrite the rules for challenging a wrongful conviction. It meets next on August 21 in Ellijay and again on September 18 in Milledgeville, and both meetings are open. At its first hearing the Chief Justice of Georgia told the members the system is broken and that only the legislature can fix it. Separately, we sent both candidates for governor the same eight questions about the prison system. One campaign answered all eight in writing; the other has not responded.
We continue to rebuild the record the state stopped keeping. This period we added a documented cause of death for 323 more people, pushing the share of coded deaths from 45 to 61 percent, and pulled 59 causes from GBI reports the state never published — five of which contradict what the state itself said. We filed 157 new records requests to get the next ones.
We don’t ask anyone to take our word for it. Every cause traces to a medical examiner’s finding, every fifty-state citation quotes the statute it rests on. The receipts were always the point.
| 12 articles · 24 stories to legislators · 818 emails · 2 new advocates |
New from GPS
The committee that could rewrite Georgia’s post-conviction rules — and when you can watch it. In 2026 the Georgia House created a Blue-Ribbon Study Committee on Criminal Post-Conviction Litigation. Post-conviction is everything that happens after a conviction and after direct appeals run out: it is the only route left for someone who can prove the State hid evidence, that a juror concealed a relationship, or that their lawyer failed them. The committee’s job is to recommend what the General Assembly should change before the 2027 session.
At its first hearing on July 10, Chief Justice Nels Peterson told the members the system is broken, that the courts did much of the breaking, and that fixing it “will require legislative action.” One member raised, unprompted, Georgia’s four-year deadline for filing habeas corpus — the rule that closes the courthouse door on claims discovered too late.
The remaining meetings are public:
Friday, August 21, 1:00 PM — Gilmer County Courthouse, Jury Assembly Room, 1 Broad St, Ellijay. The stated topic is solutions to problems with ineffective-assistance-of-counsel claims.
Friday, September 18, 9:00 AM — Old Capitol Building, 201 E Greene St, Milledgeville.
Both are livestreamed. If you have been through this process, or watched someone you love go through it, these are the rooms where it gets decided. Read more
Eight questions for the next governor. On July 25 we sent both candidates for governor the same eight questions about Georgia’s prisons — the Justice Department’s findings, independent oversight, whether the state should publish how people die in its custody, prison construction, staffing, parole, reentry, and our post-conviction reform agenda, Vision 2027. Both campaigns received the identical document on the same day.
The Bottoms campaign returned written answers to all eight. On the DOJ findings it said it would negotiate a consent agreement rather than litigate. On deaths in custody it said it would require the Department of Corrections to publish the cause and manner of every one. On oversight it committed to strengthening independent review and to a public complaint process, without naming subpoena power or unannounced inspections. It did not say whether it would build a new maximum-security prison, and on our 2027 legislative package it addressed where post-conviction petitions are heard rather than the three reforms we asked about.
The Jackson campaign has not responded. We publish what we received in full and unedited, without endorsement — Georgia Prisoners’ Speak does not support or oppose candidates for public office — and the same questions, space and treatment remain open to the other campaign. Read more
Georgia’s legal code updated for the laws that took effect July 1. Our free legal-information service answers statute questions for incarcerated people and their families, and it is only as current as the code behind it. GPS updated our database with the 2026 revisions, so the text now reflects the law as it stands after July 1 — including subsection structure, the case annotations under each section, and provisions created this year that older copies simply do not contain. We checked it by putting numerous questions about Georgia post-conviction law to our Lighthouse AI and confirming every answer against the source.
Legislator scorecard rebuilt. Letter grades are gone entirely — the scorecard pages now show what each legislator actually voted on and sponsored, with no grade, curve, or ranking. Justice reform and prison reform are tracked separately, bills outside GPS’s stated positions were dropped from scoring, and the advocacy totals on each page were corrected after they had been understating contacts. Read more
Significant work this period
323 more deaths in Georgia prisons now have a documented cause. Georgia stopped publishing why people die in its prisons, so we have been rebuilding that record one document at a time. This period we added a documented cause of death to 323 more people in our mortality database — most from medical examiner records obtained from county coroners and the GBI. The share of deaths in our database carrying a documented cause rose from 45% to 61%. Every figure remains a floor: for hundreds of deaths since 2020, no one will tell us how the person died. Read more
GBI reports received covering 88 deaths. GPS received and processed 208 documents from the Georgia Bureau of Investigation covering 88 deaths in custody. From them, 59 more deaths now carry a certified cause and manner in the GPS mortality record, established from the medical examiner’s findings because Georgia’s own reporting leaves the cause blank. Five of the reports contradict the cause the GDC had in its incident reports — including three deaths the prison system recorded as undetermined that the state’s own forensic lab had examined and named. Several were certified between four and thirteen months after examination.
157 open records requests filed with the GBI. GPS filed 157 open records requests over this period — 102 of them in a single weekend — each seeking the official record of one death in GDC custody, including the certified cause and manner. Most concern deaths the state has recorded as suicides. Each cites O.C.G.A. 45-16-24 and asks the Division to state affirmatively if it holds no record, so that an absence of records is itself on the record.
More than half of Georgians challenging a conviction have no lawyer. Of the 3,955 habeas corpus cases Georgia superior courts disposed of between 2021 and 2025, 2,309 involved a litigant with no lawyer — 58.4 percent, more than twice the statewide rate of self-representation. Georgia is one of five states that appoint no counsel in a first post-conviction proceeding, and the only state where no assessment of a petition’s merit occurs before the merits are reached. Read more
Georgia does not record whether habeas corpus petitions succeed. Georgia superior courts received 4,425 habeas corpus petitions between 2021 and 2025 and disposed of 3,955. Using the state’s own caseload reporting, GPS established that the Administrative Office of the Courts records how many cases are filed and decided — but not the outcome. The practical result is that no one, inside or outside state government, can say how often Georgia’s post-conviction remedies actually work. GPS has confirmed this with the AOC in writing.
Fifty-state survey of post-conviction procedure completed and published in full. GPS completed a comprehensive fifty-state survey documenting how each state handles claims that a conviction was obtained unconstitutionally — what procedures exist, what deadlines apply, and what avenues remain once those deadlines pass. The complete evidence is now published as its own page: the state-by-state table plus a detailed table for every question surveyed. Every cell names the statute, rule or decision it rests on and quotes the language, and every citation was re-verified against the original source, so any reader can check the work. Read more
Georgia has no hepatitis C test result for more than half the people in its prisons. In verifying its investigation into the death of a 41-year-old man from a curable disease, GPS found that the Department of Corrections holds a hepatitis C test result for only 49 percent of the people in its custody — compared with 87 percent for HIV. More people have no result on file than have a negative one.
Fourth model bill published: The Plain Error Review Act. GPS published a fourth drafted bill in its Vision 2027 package. The Plain Error Review Act would let Georgia’s appellate courts correct clear, outcome-affecting errors directly on the record in all criminal cases — as the federal system has allowed since 1944 — instead of forcing those errors through years of ineffective-assistance litigation. Read more
Open-records request filed for three decades of parole board annual reports. The Board of Pardons and Paroles publishes its annual reports online back to 2001. We requested the earlier years — fiscal 1977 through 2000 — which contain the board’s own historical record of parole and commutation decisions, including release programs the state has not run in decades.
GPS challenged a $488 state fee for records the agency’s own policy prints on demand. The Department of Corrections estimated $488.64 — sixteen hours of staff time — to produce food-service cost reports. GPS challenged the charge in full, citing the Department’s own written policy that the report is available for printing on demand. The estimate also arrived twenty business days after the deadline the Open Records Act sets for telling a requester what a request will cost.
Featured story
I’ll Take Care of It — a direct witness describes a warden at Dooly in 2022 responding to a man who spoke up during a dorm inspection with “I’ll take care of it,” after which about ten gang members converged, walked the man to his room, and he emerged days later barely able to walk. The account describes the arrangement as systemic. It is GPS’s first published first-person account of GDC staff commissioning prisoner violence rather than merely failing to prevent it.
Have an account of your own from inside? Share it through Tell My Story, and encourage a loved one inside to do the same. Tell My Story.
Articles published
Eight Questions for the Next Governor — Aug 8. Both candidates for governor received the same eight questions on the prison crisis. One campaign answered all eight; the other has not responded.
Georgia’s Family-Package Monopoly — Aug 6. Georgia ended direct family packages and funneled families to one vendor, and the state has never disclosed its cut.
“We Did a Lot of the Breaking”: Georgia’s Top Judge Asks Lawmakers to Fix the Post-Conviction System — Aug 2. Inside the first meeting of the House Blue-Ribbon Study Committee on Criminal Post-Conviction Litigation.
GCI: Georgia’s $326M No-Bid, $0-Wage Corp — Aug 2. Georgia Correctional Industries took $325.7M from GDC over eight years as a mandatory, no-bid “preferred source” running farms and factories on $0 wages.
The Cure Exists: A 41-Year-Old Died of Hepatitis C in a Georgia Prison — Jul 29. A man died at 41 of cirrhosis caused by chronic hepatitis C — curable since 2014.
The Empty Column: Georgia Won’t Say How Prisoners Die — Jul 25. The 2024 mortality report leaves the cause-of-death column empty for every person listed; for one month the state filled it in, and 41 percent of the deaths were homicides.
Spanish-language editions of these articles were also published.
Mailings this period
2 advocacy letters (1 sent certified).
We put 24 firsthand stories from inside directly into Georgia legislators’ hands this period — real accounts mailed as Tell My Story postcards, each carrying a pull-quote and a QR code to the full story so lawmakers can’t look away from what’s happening in their prisons.
Have a story that belongs in a legislator’s hands? Share it at https://gps.press/tellmystory.
Emails sent on your behalf
818 emails sent this period — 804 Legislative, 14 Advocacy.
New advocates
2 new subscribers joined this period.
Explore GPS
Two corners of GPS worth a look:
Facility Intelligence Profiles — Deep-dive profiles of each GDC facility: conditions, deaths in custody, leadership, and documented incidents, drawn from GPS’s records.
Vision 2027 — GPS’s reform agenda for the 2027 Georgia legislature: model bills, and the dormant statutes lawmakers already passed but don’t enforce.
— The GPS Team — accountability@gps.press