# The Cure Exists: A 41-Year-Old Died of Hepatitis C in a Georgia Prison > Torrey Wayne Forrester died at 41 in a Georgia prison of cirrhosis caused by chronic hepatitis C — a disease curable since 2014. The Justice Department found Georgia treating roughly ten percent of the people it knew were infected. Georgia's own profile shows it has not tested more than half the people in its custody. **Published**: 2026-07-29 **Source**: https://gps.press/the-cure-exists-a-41-year-old-died-of-hepatitis-c-in-a-georgia-prison/ **Author**: Justice Reed --- Torrey Wayne Forrester was 41 years old when he died at Washington State Prison on July 1, 2024. The Georgia Bureau of Investigation performed a complete autopsy five days later and recorded the cause plainly: complications of hepatic cirrhosis due to chronic hepatitis C. The manner of death was ruled natural. ((Georgia Bureau of Investigation, Division of Forensic Sciences, Report of the Medical Examiner, DOFS case 2024-1016707, released to Georgia Prisoners' Speak under the Georgia Open Records Act, O.C.G.A. 50-18-70, [https://gbi.georgia.gov/divisions/division-forensic-sciences](https://gbi.georgia.gov/divisions/division-forensic-sciences) )) There is a word for a disease that kills a 41-year-old man in the custody of the state, and that word is not natural. Hepatitis C has been curable since 2014. A course of direct-acting antiviral tablets, taken for eight to twelve weeks, cures the infection in more than ninety percent of patients. It is one of the genuine triumphs of modern medicine: a chronic viral disease that once destroyed livers over decades is now, for most people who receive the pills, simply gone. Forrester did not receive that outcome. His liver failed instead. What Georgia Prisoners' Speak cannot yet tell you — because the state has not told anyone — is whether he was ever screened, ever diagnosed, or ever offered the cure. What we can tell you is what the United States Department of Justice found when it examined the same medical system that was responsible for him. ## Ten Percent On October 1, 2024, three months after Forrester died, the Justice Department issued findings that conditions in Georgia's prisons violate the Constitution. ((U.S. Department of Justice, Justice Department Finds Unconstitutional Conditions in Georgia Prisons, October 1, 2024, [https://www.justice.gov/archives/opa/pr/justice-department-finds-unconstitutional-conditions-georgia-prisons](https://www.justice.gov/archives/opa/pr/justice-department-finds-unconstitutional-conditions-georgia-prisons) )) Buried in that report, alongside the violence and the understaffing that drew the headlines, was a finding about medical care that received almost no attention. Federal investigators found that approximately ten percent of people in Georgia prisons diagnosed with hepatitis C or HIV were receiving treatment. Ten percent. Not ten percent of a difficult, experimental, or scarce intervention — ten percent of a standard, curative, commercially available course of pills that the rest of American medicine considers routine. Georgia's own published statistical profile of its prison population identifies 1,850 people in its custody as hepatitis C positive. ((Georgia Department of Corrections, Inmate Statistical Profile, All Active Inmates, data through June 2026, produced 01-JUL-26, page 91, [https://gdc.georgia.gov/document/monthly-statistical-reports/profile-all-inmates-2026-06/download](https://gdc.georgia.gov/document/monthly-statistical-reports/profile-all-inmates-2026-06/download) )) The same page carries a second number, and it is the more important one. That 1,850 is drawn from 26,119 people — everyone in the system with a hepatitis C test result on file. For 27,471 others, the column reads *Not Reported*. Out of 53,590 people in the department's custody, Georgia has no hepatitis C result for more than half of them. More people have no result on file than have a negative one. The contrast with HIV, in the same document, is the part that is hard to explain away. For HIV, the department reports a test result for 46,786 people — 87 percent of everyone in its custody. For hepatitis C, the figure is 49 percent. The same agency, the same population, the same intake process, and one bloodborne infection is tracked at nearly twice the rate of the other. Apply the department's own positivity rate — 7.08 percent among the people it has tested — to the 27,471 it has not, and the arithmetic implies nearly two thousand additional infections it has not identified, roughly doubling the known burden. National research places hepatitis C prevalence among incarcerated people at about fifteen percent worldwide, and studies of United States prison systems have found rates as high as seventeen percent, ((Dolan et al., Global burden of HIV, viral hepatitis, and tuberculosis in prisoners and detainees, The Lancet, 2016, [https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/27427453/](https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/27427453/) )) which would put the real figure higher still. So the question sitting underneath the treatment question is not rhetorical, and it does not require an estimate to answer. How many people in Georgia prisons have hepatitis C and do not know it? In more than half of all cases, the state's own profile says it has not looked. ## Seventeen Deaths, and the Youngest by Nineteen Years Georgia Prisoners' Speak maintains an independent database of deaths in the custody of the Georgia Department of Corrections, built from coroner records, medical examiner reports, and open-records productions. Since 2021, it documents seventeen deaths in which cirrhosis or liver disease appears among the causes or significant contributing conditions. At least six of those records name hepatitis explicitly. The pattern in those records is what makes Forrester's case stand out. The others died at 76, 70, 69, 66, 63, 63, 63, 61, 60, 59, 58, 58, 52, 51, and 46. Their median age was around sixty. Forrester was forty-one — nineteen years younger than the middle of that group, and five years younger than anyone else on it. Cirrhosis from hepatitis C is a disease of duration. It takes decades of untreated infection to scar a liver beyond function. A man reaching that endpoint at forty-one is a man who carried the virus, untreated, through most of his adult life — including whatever portion of it the State of Georgia was responsible for his health care. > A curable infection became a fatal one. That transition did not happen in a moment. It happened over years, in a system that the Justice Department found was treating roughly one in ten of the people it knew were infected. ## What Other States Did When They Were Sued Georgia is not the first state to face this question. It is one of the last to face it without consequence. When incarcerated people elsewhere sued over hepatitis C treatment, the results varied — but the litigation forced the question into the open. Florida shows both the reach and the limits of that route: a federal district judge ordered the state corrections department to provide direct-acting antivirals, entering a permanent injunction in 2019, and the Eleventh Circuit vacated that injunction the following year. ((Hoffer v. Secretary, Florida Department of Corrections, No. 19-11921, Eleventh Circuit, August 31, 2020, [https://law.justia.com/cases/federal/appellate-courts/ca11/19-11921/19-11921-2020-08-31.html](https://law.justia.com/cases/federal/appellate-courts/ca11/19-11921/19-11921-2020-08-31.html) )) North Carolina went further: the state settled a class action in 2021, and its own corrections department announced it would treat at least 2,100 people with hepatitis C over five years. ((North Carolina Department of Public Safety, N.C. Department of Public Safety Settles Hepatitis C Lawsuit, March 8, 2021, [https://www.dac.nc.gov/news/press-releases/2021/03/08/nc-department-public-safety-settles-hepatitis-c-lawsuit](https://www.dac.nc.gov/news/press-releases/2021/03/08/nc-department-public-safety-settles-hepatitis-c-lawsuit) )) Vermont agreed to abandon restrictions that had rationed treatment by how sick a person had already become. ((Center for Health Law and Policy Innovation, Vermont Hepatitis C Department of Corrections, [https://chlpi.org/project/vermont-hepatitis-c-department-of-corrections/](https://chlpi.org/project/vermont-hepatitis-c-department-of-corrections/) )) The legal principle that emerged from those cases is not obscure. Courts have repeatedly held that a state may violate the Eighth Amendment when officials know a person in their custody is infected with hepatitis C and withhold curative therapy on the basis that the person is not sick enough yet. ((Enforcement of Legal Remedies to Secure Hepatitis C Virus Treatment With Direct-Acting Antiviral Therapies in Correctional Facilities and Medicaid Programs, National Institutes of Health, [https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7407058/](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7407058/) )) Waiting until the liver fails is not a treatment protocol. It is a budget strategy with a body count. ## The Money Argument, and Why It Does Not Hold There is a defense available to Georgia, and it is worth stating fairly. Testimony to a 2024 Georgia Senate study committee indicated that more than half of the corrections agency's pharmacy budget goes toward hepatitis and HIV medications. ((Final Report of the Senate Supporting Safety and Welfare of All Individuals in Department of Corrections Facilities Study Committee, Georgia State Senate, December 2024, [https://www.senate.ga.gov/committees/Documents/2024SenateStudyCommDOCFinalReport.pdf](https://www.senate.ga.gov/committees/Documents/2024SenateStudyCommDOCFinalReport.pdf) )) The drugs are expensive. The state is spending real money. But that figure describes the price of the medication, not the reach of the treatment. More than half of a pharmacy budget, spent while roughly one in ten diagnosed people receives therapy, is not evidence of generosity. It is evidence that these drugs cost a great deal and that Georgia is buying them for a small fraction of the people who need them. The comparison the state does not invite is the other one. A course of curative antivirals is a one-time expense that ends the disease. Decades of managing advancing liver disease — the hospitalizations, the specialist care, the transplant evaluations, the terminal admissions — are not. Georgia already knows what the second path costs, because it has paid for it. One of the seventeen people in our records died after a liver transplant. ## What We Have Asked For Georgia Prisoners' Speak has filed an open-records request with the Department of Corrections seeking the documents that would answer the questions this death raises: the agency's hepatitis C screening and treatment protocol, the number of people diagnosed, the number actually started on direct-acting antivirals, and the criteria used to decide who gets treated and who waits. We do not yet have them. Our experience of asking is itself part of this story. The department does not typically deny our requests — it prices them. It has quoted this newsroom $1,320 for roughly eleven pages of one record, demanded $6,370.54 in prepayment on another, and quoted $88,944 to retrieve a third — retrieval only, over three to six months of staff time, with review and redaction not estimated at all. When we filed a formal complaint with the Georgia Attorney General's Open Government Mediation Program, a Senior Assistant Attorney General replied in writing that her office could not mediate it: > "Because our office represents the GDC, we are not able to mediate Open Records Act complaints against them." The office designated by Georgia law to resolve open-records disputes is also the lawyer for the agency the dispute is with. Against a state agency, the remedy does not fail so much as it cannot be invoked. ## The Question That Remains Torrey Wayne Forrester's death certificate says natural causes, and in the narrow medical sense it is accurate. His liver failed because a virus scarred it beyond repair. The larger question is not medical. Hepatitis C is curable. Georgia knows who has it, at least in part, and the Justice Department found the state treating about ten percent of them. Somewhere in the years before July 1, 2024, there was a point at which a course of pills would have made Forrester's death impossible. Whether anyone ever offered them to him is a fact the State of Georgia possesses and has not disclosed. Until it does, the honest description of what happened is this: a man died at forty-one, in the custody of the State of Georgia, of a disease that medicine learned to cure a decade before he died. --- ## Call to Action: What You Can Do Awareness without action changes nothing. Here's how you can help push for accountability and real reform: **Join the GPS Advocacy Network** — Sign up at [https://gps.press/become-an-advocate/](https://gps.press/become-an-advocate/) and we'll advocate on your behalf every week. GPS identifies your state legislators, crafts personalized letters on the most pressing prison issues, and sends them directly to the representatives who represent you. You receive a copy of every letter. It takes two minutes to sign up — we handle the rest. **Send a 60-Second Message** — Pick an issue, get a ready-to-edit message with the verified facts already in it, and email your state House representative and senator directly from your own inbox at [https://gps.press/send-a-message/.](https://gps.press/send-a-message/.) No signup, nothing stored — it takes about a minute. **Tell My Story** — Are you or a loved one affected by Georgia's prison system? GPS publishes first-person accounts from incarcerated people and their families. Submit your story at [https://gps.press/category/tellmystory/](https://gps.press/category/tellmystory/) and help the world understand what's really happening behind the walls. **Contact Your Representatives** — Your state legislators control GDC's budget, oversight, and the laws that created these failures. Find your Georgia legislators at [https://gps.press/find-your-legislator/](https://gps.press/find-your-legislator/) or call Governor Kemp at (404) 656-1776 or the GDC Commissioner at (478) 992-5246. **Record Every Call** — If you call GDC, a facility, a warden's office, or any state official, record it. Georgia is a one-party-consent state, which means you may lawfully record any call you are part of. Families are routinely told one thing on the phone and something else in writing, and without a recording it is your memory against a state employee's account. Practice the setup before the call that matters: [https://gps.press/record-every-call-how-to-expose-contempt-and-abuse/](https://gps.press/record-every-call-how-to-expose-contempt-and-abuse/) **Demand Media Coverage** — Contact newsrooms at the AJC, local TV stations, and national criminal justice outlets. More coverage means more pressure. **Amplify on Social Media** — Share this article and tag @GovKemp, @GDC_Georgia, and your local representatives. Use #GAPrisons, #PrisonReform, #GeorgiaPrisonerSpeak. **Message the Board of Corrections** — The citizen board that oversees the GDC publishes no contact details for its members. GPS built the missing front door: pick a board member and a policy message and send it from your own email at [https://gps.press/write-the-board/.](https://gps.press/write-the-board/.) **File Public Records Requests** — Georgia's Open Records Act gives every citizen the right to request incident reports, death records, staffing data, medical logs, and financial documents. Start with the GPS Action Toolkits at [https://gps.press/toolkits/](https://gps.press/toolkits/) — the Open Records Toolkit walks you through what to ask for, gives you ready-to-file request templates, and tells you what to do when the state says no. File directly with GDC at [https://georgiadcor.govqa.us/WEBAPP/_rs/SupportHome.aspx.](https://georgiadcor.govqa.us/WEBAPP/_rs/SupportHome.aspx.) --- ## Further Reading - [Deaths in Custody](https://gps.press/deaths-in-custody/) — The GPS database of deaths in Georgia Department of Corrections custody, built from coroner records, medical examiner reports, and open-records productions. - [The Empty Column](https://gps.press/the-empty-column/) — What happened when Georgia stopped disclosing why people die in its prisons. - [Vision 2027](https://gps.press/vision2027/) — GPS's post-conviction and accountability reform platform, including model legislation ready for sponsors to file. - [GPS Action Toolkits](https://gps.press/toolkits/) — Step-by-step guides for filing open-records requests, grievances, and court filings. - [Follow the Money](https://gps.press/follow-the-money/) — Where Georgia's corrections dollars actually go. --- ## GPS Intelligence System - [Facility Intelligence Profiles](https://gps.press/intelligence/) — Facility-level analysis drawn from GPS's databases of deaths, conditions reports, staffing, and spending. - [Washington State Prison](https://gps.press/facility/washington-state-prison/) — Data and reporting on the facility where Torrey Wayne Forrester died, one of the facilities named in the Justice Department's findings. --- ## Explore the Data - [GDC Statistics Portal](https://gps.press/gdc-statistics/) — Population, demographics, sentencing, and facility data drawn from Georgia's own records. - [Lighthouse](https://gps.press/lighthouse/) — Ask questions about Georgia's prison system and get answers grounded in GPS's research library and public records. - [AI Content Index](https://gps.press/ai-content-index/) — How GPS uses AI, what it is permitted to do, and how its output is verified. --- ## About GPS Georgia Prisoners' Speak is the public program of The GDC Accountability Project, Inc., a Georgia nonprofit and 501(c)(3) public charity. We document what happens inside Georgia's prison system and make it visible to the people it affects most — incarcerated Georgians and their families. We build public databases from primary records, publish firsthand accounts from people inside, and put accountability tools directly into the hands of families and citizens. We accept no donations from the community we serve. ![GPS Footer](https://gps.press/wp-content/uploads/2025/03/GPS-Ad2.jpg) ---