Mortality & Deaths in Custody

The Shape of the Record

Georgia Prisoners' Speak's mortality registry, read for this page on October 25, 2026, holds 1,918 deaths in Georgia Department of Corrections custody since January 1, 2020, including 33 in the previous 90 days. The full, continuously updated list is published at gps.press/georgia-prison-deaths. Every one of these counts is a floor: the department reports deaths roughly two months late, and earlier snapshots of the same registry published in GPS collections record 1,767, 1,797, 1,849 and 1,859 deaths — the number grows as documentation arrives, not because people stop dying.

The registry's cause distribution is itself the central finding. Of 1,919 records in the current manifest, 779 are classified Natural/Medical, 563 Unknown/Pending, 268 Homicide, 158 Suicide, 59 Overdose, 47 Other, 33 Accident, 9 Medical Neglect, and one each Deliberate Indifference, Use of Force and Execution. That 563 deaths — 29 percent of the registry — carry no determined cause is not a gap in GPS's research alone; it is the product of an official record that has been progressively closed (see *Misclassification and the Disclosure Retreat*).

The yearly series is violent and the sources do not agree on it, which is worth stating plainly. The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, charting Georgia Department of Corrections data, reported deaths by calendar year as 143 (2015), 138 (2016), 175 (2017), 175 (2018), 160 (2019), 281 (2020), 257 (2021), 255 (2022), 262 (2023) and 332 (2024) [#26069]. The federal Bureau of Justice Statistics, a separate series with different definitions and a different collection method, reports 131, 133, 173, 163 and 157 for 2015 through 2019 [#26234]; those two series must not be merged into one trend. For 2024, GPS collections variously record 333 [#7241], 332 [#5928] and 330 [#3177]; the discrepancy tracks differing snapshots and whether late-reported deaths had arrived. What is not disputed is the direction: 2024 was the deadliest year in the record, roughly one death per day, and 2025 followed with 301 [#3179]. GPS recorded 95 deaths in the first four months of 2026, 27 of them confirmed homicides [#7243].

The historical depth matters for scale. Georgia's own annual reports recorded 21 deaths in fiscal year 1952 and 17 in fiscal year 1960; BJS counted 60 correctional-facility deaths in Georgia in 1990 [#20356], 120 in 1995 [#20363] and 98 in 1998 [#20358] — numbers from a smaller, younger, pre-*Brown v. Plata*-era system. The modern annual death rate in Georgia custody is roughly 0.3 to 0.5 percent, against 10 to 25 percent during the convict leasing era [#3498]. The deaths are fewer per capita than in 1880 and far more numerous in absolute terms than in 1990, and the population dying is older: of the 333 deaths in 2024, 185 (55.6 percent) were people aged 50 or older, with an average age at death of 51.4 [#5745].

The Named Dead: The Most Recent Registry Entries

GPS has recorded 33 deaths in the last 90 days and 1,918 since January 1, 2020. Counts summarize the dead; they do not replace them. The 25 most recent registry entries are named here, with the date, facility and cause the registry carries.

• John Doe died October 23, 2026, at Macon State Prison; the cause is recorded as unknown or pending. The registry carries "John Doe" as the name on this record.
• Veasna Johnathan Bun died October 22, 2026, at Macon State Prison; the cause is recorded as unknown or pending.
• Juld Gerald Carter died October 21, 2026, at Macon State Prison; the registry records the death as a homicide.
• Jane Doe died October 19, 2026, at Pulaski State Prison; the registry records the cause as natural or medical. The registry carries "Jane Doe" as the name on this record.
• Wendell Thomas Cochran died September 22, 2026, at Georgia Diagnostic and Classification State Prison; the cause is recorded as unknown or pending.
• Donnie Gene Poland died September 15, 2026, at Augusta State Medical Prison; the registry records the cause as natural or medical.
• David Williams died September 13, 2026, at Ware State Prison; the registry records the death as a suicide.
• Demilo Ponchorello Johnson died September 10, 2026, at Augusta State Medical Prison; the registry records the cause as natural or medical.
• Maurice Antonio Brown died September 3, 2026, at Wilcox State Prison; the registry records the death as a homicide.
• Sheldon Leroy Burns died August 30, 2026, at Coastal State Prison; the registry records the cause as natural or medical.
• Joseph Earl Adams, 58, died August 30, 2026, at Washington State Prison; the cause is recorded as unknown or pending.
• David Rackley Pritchett, 66, died August 29, 2026, at Metro Reentry Center; the cause is recorded as unknown or pending.
• Dwight Bernard Freeman, 69, died August 28, 2026, at Augusta State Medical Prison; the cause is recorded as unknown or pending.
• Thomas Harold Broach, 81, died August 22, 2026, at Georgia Diagnostic and Classification State Prison; the cause is recorded as unknown or pending.
• Randy Walton, 67, died August 21, 2026, at Calhoun State Prison; the cause is recorded as unknown or pending.
• Jerry Jerome Smith, 61, died August 21, 2026, at Dooly State Prison; the cause is recorded as unknown or pending.
• Tony Horne, 48, died August 20, 2026, at Macon State Prison; the cause is recorded as unknown or pending.
• Akeem Ajima Lanier, 38, died August 20, 2026, at Riverbend Correctional and Rehabilitation Facility; the cause is recorded as unknown or pending.
• Jimmie Lee Dennis, 64, died August 17, 2026, at Augusta State Medical Prison; the cause is recorded as unknown or pending.
• Robert Franklin Barbee, 57, died August 14, 2026, at Baldwin State Prison; the cause is recorded as unknown or pending.
• James Edward Loren, 54, died August 13, 2026, at Valdosta State Prison; the cause is recorded as unknown or pending.
• Jerry Mccaster, 60, died August 11, 2026, at Dooly State Prison; the cause is recorded as unknown or pending.
• Marquavious Devante Knox, 34, died August 10, 2026, at Riverbend Correctional and Rehabilitation Facility; the cause is recorded as unknown or pending.
• David Allan Dowling, 69, died August 9, 2026, at Ware State Prison; the cause is recorded as unknown or pending.
• Michael Wayne Forker, 74, died August 8, 2026, at Georgia Diagnostic and Classification State Prison; the cause is recorded as unknown or pending.

The list is capped at 25; the full record, with every earlier entry, is at the link above. Two features of the recent entries are worth naming. The first is the weight of *unknown or pending*: seventeen of the 25 carry no determined cause, and most of those are people in their fifties, sixties and seventies dying at facilities that are not hospitals. The second is the concentration at Macon State Prison and Augusta State Medical Prison, the two facilities that recur throughout this page as the system's deadliest and its de facto hospice.

Homicide: The Fastest-Rising Cause, and the Facilities Where It Happens

The Department of Justice's October 1, 2024 findings letter put a number on what families had been saying for years: over the six-year period from 2018 through 2023, the Georgia Department of Corrections reported 142 homicides in its prisons — 48 in the first three years and 94 in the latter three, a 95.8 percent increase [#26271]. The department's own mortality reports, cited in the same federal findings, give the year-by-year series: 7 homicides in 2018, 13 in 2019, 28 in 2020, 28 in 2021, 31 in 2022 and 35 in 2023 [#25943]. Before 2018 the line was flat: from 2011 through 2018 the number never exceeded nine in a year [#2491], and the Southern Center for Human Rights told a Georgia Senate committee that 33 homicides occurred in facilities from 2010 to 2014 [#20345].

The state's rate, not just its count, is the outlier. Georgia's 2019 prison homicide rate was 34 per 100,000 people against a national state-prison average of 12 per 100,000 [#25945], and by 2024 the Department of Justice described Georgia's in-prison homicide rate as nearly eight times the national average [#3668]. Georgia recorded 98 prison homicides between 2021 and 2023; Texas, with twice the prison population, recorded 37 [#5934]. In 2024 the department told the Atlanta Journal-Constitution it had investigated 66 prisoner deaths as homicides while the newspaper independently identified 62 people who died from suspected or confirmed homicides [#20202]; at least 44 had been counted by mid-October [#20312]. The violence did not recede: 42 deaths were investigated as possible homicides in the first six months of 2025 [#3865], nine in June 2025 alone [#3866], and GPS has confirmed 23 homicides in the first quarter of 2026 [#5505] with 27 confirmed by late April [#7243].

Homicide in Georgia prisons is not evenly distributed. The Atlanta Journal-Constitution's compilation counts 24 homicides at Macon State Prison [#23477], 19 at Smith [#22903], 13 at Telfair [#22064], 11 at Valdosta [#24402], 10 at Ware [#25856], 8 each at Phillips [#21599], Baldwin [#25716] and Hancock [#23698], 6 at Hays [#22267], 5 at Georgia Diagnostic and Classification [#21774], 4 at Washington [#25869] and 4 at Calhoun [#22539]. Augusta State Medical Prison — the system's hospital — has recorded 11 homicides since 2020 [#23868]. In 2020 Macon had eight homicides, more than any other prison that year [#23374]; in 2021 the highest count was at Smith, with six [#20328]; in 2022 Phillips led with five [#21626]; in 2023 Smith again had more than any other facility, including seven incarcerated people and one correctional officer killed [#22890].

The individual deaths are specific and repeat a pattern. Freddie Lee Talley, 31, died May 6, 2024, at Hays of a stab wound to the chest, with six sharpened implements of 10.5 to 22 inches listed in the incident report [#22266]. Kevin Deshawn Lamar, 44, died August 10, 2023, at Macon of sharp-force chest trauma; his cellmate was charged [#25771]. Quafabian Melik McBride, 19, died September 30, 2022, in the lockdown unit at Phillips during a gang-related fight, having been brought to that unit that day through arrangements made by officers [#21604]. Charles "Tristen" James McKee, 24, was stabbed 13 times at Hancock on May 22, 2022, in a dorm the Department of Justice found was occupied by gang members hostile to LGBTQ prisoners [#23661]. Roderick Hayes, 29, was killed at Augusta State Medical Prison in May 2024; a correctional officer, Lloyd Hopkins, was charged with felony murder, and two other incarcerated people were also charged [#25652]. Je'Vion Benham, 21, was found dead at Valdosta on December 24, 2025; the Lowndes County coroner ruled the cause strangulation and the manner homicide, and estimated he had died two days earlier [#24412].

The mechanisms the federal investigation identified are structural rather than episodic: officers absent from control centers, a single officer supervising a control center and both sides of a housing unit where a handcuffed man was killed [#2548], no staff checks for twelve hours before a body was found [#2547], and classification decisions that placed people with known enemies. At Calhoun, a 21-year-old was killed by his cellmate after staff moved the assailant out of segregation to general population and back without following procedure; both men had told an orderly they wanted to be separated [#22476]. The department's Office of Professional Standards identified multiple policy violations in that case, and the personnel files of the three security staff involved contained no mention of the homicide or any resulting discipline [#22485].

Misclassification and the Disclosure Retreat

The gap between how people die and how their deaths are recorded is the defining feature of Georgia's mortality data. GPS's original research found that in at least 13 cases the department reported a death from "natural causes" that a medical examiner later determined was an accidental drug overdose, and in 31 additional cases labeled the death "undetermined" where the medical examiner ruled an accidental overdose — at least 44 deaths in which the official cause and the medical finding diverge [#569][#570][#571]. The same pattern appears in cases that were plainly violent: the Department of Justice identified seven deaths from 2022 that the department categorized as undetermined or natural until it reclassified them as homicides in 2024, though other official records made the homicides clear much earlier [#2616].

The federal findings state the conclusion directly. The department "inaccurately reports these deaths both internally and externally, and in a manner that underreports the extent of violence and homicide in its prisons," and its mortality data "categorizes many deaths that obviously were homicides as having an unknown reason or unknown verified cause of death" [#1606][#5943]. The clearest illustration is arithmetic: for the first five months of 2024 the department's mortality data reported six homicides, while its own incident reports recorded at least 18 [#2614]. The Atlanta Journal-Constitution reported that the January and February mortality reports listed the manner of death of 35 prisoners as unknown, five as natural, seven as suicides and seven as homicides, while the March report listed 18 deaths with nothing beyond names and identification numbers [#23529].

In March 2024 the department stopped publishing cause of death in its monthly mortality reports altogether, saying it would release manner of death only after local medical examiners made determinations [#8156]. Commissioner Tyrone Oliver told the Atlanta Journal-Constitution that listing the manner of death had been "just speculation" on the agency's part [#23528]. The effect on research is immediate: no federal or academic suicide count for Georgia prisons exists after 2021 [#8389], and any external estimate of nutrition-related, overdose or neglect deaths runs into a record that no longer carries the information [#7151].

The internal review machinery that might have caught errors has a documented history of not functioning. A 2007 state audit found the department's Office of Health Services did not perform executive mortality reviews of prisoner deaths and could not locate medical files for many deceased people; of 233 deaths in calendar years 2005 and 2006, excluding executions, only 30 had evidence that a mortality review was performed, and files could not be found for 86 of the 203 unreviewed cases [#26072][#13749]. Reviews had stopped in late 2005 and a committee was re-established in May 2006 [#13751]; clinical audits and executive mortality reviews "deteriorated considerably" after central office staff cuts [#13752]. A Mortality Review Committee exists today under GDC SOP 507.04.67 and reviews clinical peer-review packets [#26047], but whether it assesses nutritional contribution to natural-causes deaths is not publicly known [#7211].

Outside the department, the check is discretionary. Under Georgia law a medical examiner's inquiry is mandatory for any death of a prisoner, but a full autopsy is not: the medical examiner has "sole discretion" to decide whether an autopsy or limited dissection is required, and a coroner may certify a death without an autopsy, with cause entered as "pending" and never amended [#8116][#8140][#8141]. Wisconsin and Virginia require autopsies for in-custody deaths in state facilities [#8170][#8172]; Georgia does not. Capacity compounds discretion: the Georgia Bureau of Investigation averages roughly 4,500 autopsies a year, about 300 per pathologist, above the National Association of Medical Examiners' recommended maximum of 250 and approaching the 325 accreditation cap, with some examiners above 400 during the 2022–2023 shortage [#8118], and only about 67 percent of autopsy reports are completed within the 90-day standard [#8119].

Suicide, Isolation, and the Mental-Health System

Suicide is the second-largest determined unnatural cause of death in Georgia custody, and the trend is documented even though the state has stopped documenting it. Georgia state prisons recorded 7 suicides in 2015, 7 in 2016, 19 in 2017, 17 in 2018 and 24 in 2019 [#8355][#8357][#8359]; by five-year block the counts run 22 (2001–2004), 30 (2005–2009), 19 (2010–2014) and 74 (2015–2019), for 145 total from 2001 to 2019 [#8364][#8365][#8366][#8367]. The rate moved with the count: 11 per 100,000 in 2001–2004 and 2005–2009, 8 per 100,000 in 2010–2014, and 31 per 100,000 in 2015–2019 — above the U.S. total of 21, the all-states figure of 22, and the Southern figure of 24 [#8368].

The comparison that rules out a general social trend is the county jails. Georgia jails recorded 75, 68, 66 and 73 suicides across the same four five-year blocks, a flat line and a period average of 34 per 100,000, below the national jail average of 43 [#8374][#8377][#8383]. Georgia's prisons roughly quadrupled their suicide count while its jails did not [#8384]. Later reporting put the counts higher still: 29 in 2020 [#8360], 23 in 2021 [#8361], and 40 suicides in fiscal year 2023 acknowledged in the department's own September 2023 slide deck to the State Board of Corrections, alongside 38 homicides [#25946]. GPS's own registry now classifies 158 deaths as suicides; its earlier, medical-examiner-derived count of 67 was assembled from 61 medical examiner records, five accounts from incarcerated people and one county coroner — none from the Georgia Department of Corrections [#8393].

Restrictive housing is where the concentration sits. Nationally, people in solitary confinement make up 6 to 8 percent of the prison population and account for roughly half of prison suicides [#1447]. Georgia's recent cases follow that shape. Miguel Angel Duran, 44, died by suicide on March 1, 2026, in segregation at Central State Prison [#6908]. Justin Waymon Hollingsworth, 43, died by hanging in segregation at Rogers State Prison on June 26, 2025 [#6909]. Denecia Nichelle Randall, 28, died by suicide by hanging at Pulaski State Prison on March 30, 2026, while in lockdown [#6907]. Christopher Lee, 19, was found dead in a stripped cell at Georgia Diagnostic and Classification Prison on January 31, 2026, over a weekend [#6906]. Sheqweetta Vaughan, 32, was found decomposing in a segregation cell at Lee Arrendale State Prison on July 9, 2025, in a cell in the 90s, after a neighboring prisoner reported hearing her call for medical help more than 28 hours earlier [#6894].

The Department of Justice documented individual failures in detail. A transgender woman with a diagnosis of gender dysphoria and a history of mental health issues died of an apparent suicide shortly after federal investigators interviewed her at Coastal State Prison in the fall of 2022 [#25947]. A woman who filed PREA complaints and asked to be moved out of isolation was denied and died by suicide in the isolation unit the next day [#25948]. Jerry Lackey was found hanging in the mental health unit at Augusta State Medical Prison one evening in 2020 when the only officer available in the unit was needed elsewhere and the required 15-minute checks did not happen [#26116]. The department's own suicide rate estimates run above 40 per 100,000, roughly double the national prison average [#5936]. The settlements follow: $2.2 million to the family of Jenna Mitchell, a transgender woman at Valdosta State Prison who died in 2017 after her suicide threats were reported to the warden and she was left hanging for several minutes [#6774]; $700,000 for Demitri Carter, who had multiple prior attempts and died at Phillips in 2017 [#6799]; $600,000 for Amanuel Selassie Geberyesus, placed in a regular cell at Hancock in 2019 after a counselor advised it would be unsafe [#6800].

Overdose, Medical Neglect, and the Deaths That Do Not Look Like Violence

Georgia recorded 2 drug overdose deaths among state prisoners in 2018, then at least 49 between 2019 and 2022, with at least five more confirmed through mid-2023 [#2][#3][#4]. Methamphetamine is the leading cause, cited in at least 45 deaths since 2018 [#7]; synthetic cannabinoids have caused at least 13 [#9]; fentanyl first appears as a cause of death in June 2021 and has been involved in at least eight or nine since [#8]; and an emerging synthetic opioid known as "pyro" — N-pyrrolidino etonitazene — has been identified in Georgia prison overdose deaths, including 30-year-old Marcus Sutton, who died at the Special Management Unit at Georgia Diagnostic and Classification Prison in February 2023 [#95][#21939]. Christina Buttery was found dead in her bunk at Pulaski State Prison on December 21, 2022, from methamphetamine combined with fentanyl [#24699].

The official accounting does not match this. The federal Bureau of Justice Statistics' cumulative table for Georgia state prisoners records 12 drug and alcohol intoxication deaths across the entire multi-year reporting period, against 780 heart disease deaths, 597 cancer deaths, 145 suicides, 89 homicides and 22 accidents [#26235]. GPS's own far larger figure for a four-year window is one measure of how much overdose death has been recorded under another name — a divergence consistent with the 44 overdose deaths GPS found logged as natural or undetermined [#571]. The federal findings also record a case in which a man interviewed at Ware State Prison told investigators drugs were easy to obtain, described post-traumatic stress disorder worse than combat, and died four days later of acute methamphetamine toxicity; his body was found slumped over a second-floor railing and left there for several hours because no officers were in the control center [#23262].

Deaths from medical neglect follow the same pattern of a documented cause and an official one that says otherwise. In February 2023 an incarcerated person was found dead in his restrictive-housing cell at Calhoun State Prison, wrapped in mattress padding; no one had entered the cell for two days, staff had shut off the water supply and closed the food flap, and the cause of death was dehydration with renal failure [#6655][#22482]. Juan Carlos Ramirez Bibiano, 27, died at Telfair State Prison on July 20, 2023, after officers left him in an outdoor recreation cage for five hours at a 105-degree heat index; he arrived at the hospital with an internal body temperature of 107°F, and the department reported his death as "natural causes" [#6286][#22004]. Two Hays State Prison prisoners died three years apart of diabetic ketoacidosis without ever having been diagnosed with diabetes [#22282]; at Dooly State Prison, James Yarbrough died in August 2020 of ketoacidosis after months of uncontrolled diabetes, and the state settled the medical malpractice claim for $700,000 in 2023 [#25749]. Eight women died at Pulaski State Prison from cancer and other medical conditions in ten months in 2019 [#24862], a facility whose medical director from 2006 to 2015, Dr. Yvon Nazaire, had at least 22 prisoners die under his care before his license expired and the medical board lost jurisdiction over him [#5101][#24822].

The consequence of these failures is also financial. The department agreed to pay $5 million in 2023 to the estate of Thomas Henry Giles, a mentally ill prisoner left for hours in a locked, burning cell at Augusta State Medical Prison; the medical examiner found a carbon monoxide level of 76 percent and ruled the death a homicide [#26103][#6840]. It paid $4 million in April 2026 to the family of David Henegar, hogtied, beaten and choked by his cellmate over five hours at Johnson State Prison in 2021 while guards heard his pleas [#6772], and $350,000 to the estate of a prisoner murdered at Hays [#26335]. The federal findings' recommended remedies include complete, interdisciplinary morbidity and mortality reviews of all deaths and attempted suicides, examined for patterns and trends, with systemic deficiencies corrected [#25949] — the function the state's own reviews have not performed.

Accountability: Who Investigates, Who Decides, and What Is Withheld

Every death in Georgia custody sets off a sequence that looks like accountability and rarely produces it. The facility goes on lockdown, the body goes to a county coroner and then to the Georgia Bureau of Investigation crime lab, and the department's Office of Professional Standards opens an investigation as "standard procedure" [#7550][#24523]. When an officer is suspected, the GBI takes the lead. What the sequence does not produce is a public finding. Internal investigation reports are classified as confidential state secrets unless the commissioner declassifies them in writing [#8079], and the department has refused to release investigative records around specific deaths on exactly that basis [#1405]. The department told the Department of Justice that it has no centralized policies or procedures governing facility-level investigations or incident reviews at all [#2629].

The discipline record is thinner than the death record. In the Calhoun classification homicide, the personnel files of the three security staff identified in the internal investigation contained no mention of the homicide or any resulting discipline or counseling, and their subsequent evaluations were largely positive [#22485]. In the Mitchell case at Valdosta, the department's investigation was described in reporting as superficial and produced retraining recommendations rather than termination or prosecution; the supervisor who prepared a false incident report was not prosecuted [#6775]. When a Georgia Senate study committee considered a proposal to have the GBI investigate all in-custody deaths, it did not make the final list [#8083].

Georgia's decentralized death-investigation system puts the decisive judgment in elected county coroners and GBI medical examiners working under caseload pressure. A coroner may certify a death without an autopsy and leave the cause "pending"; the medical examiner decides whether an autopsy happens at all; and state law permits cause-of-death testimony from personnel who are not physicians [#8116][#8140][#7916]. Coroners themselves have said publicly what the records show: after Je'Vion Benham was found decomposing two days after his death at Valdosta State Prison, Lowndes County Coroner Austin Fiveash said it "seems unfathomable that a prison can miss someone for two days" [#24413]. GDC auditors found that at Valdosta, 30-minute welfare checks were not entered with enough frequency to satisfy policy and hours of required checks were skipped on several days [#21527].

The federal findings letter of October 1, 2024 concluded that the State of Georgia engages in a pattern or practice of Eighth Amendment violations [#6776], and the department's disclosure posture has moved the other way: it ended press releases announcing deaths in its facilities [#7573], restricted details about deaths as homicides rose [#5963], and stopped publishing cause of death [#8389]. The mortality review that the Department of Justice prescribed — complete, interdisciplinary review of every death and attempted suicide, with pattern analysis and correction — remains the measure against which the state's own practice can be read [#26279]. Until cause of death is published, until autopsies are mandatory rather than discretionary, and until internal findings are public, the count on this page will keep being assembled from the outside: from coroners, from medical examiners, from court filings, and from the last people to see the dead alive.