Georgia Prisoners’ Speak
Model Legislation | Withdrawn August 2026
The Sleeping Giants Act
Withdrawn — no bill is needed
Why GPS withdrew this bill
The rights this bill set out to restore are already on the books. What they lack is not new statutory text — it is the court Georgia’s own precedent routes them to. Repealing the four-year habeas deadline restores the § 17-9-4 rights, and no further bill is needed.
GPS published the Sleeping Giants Act in March 2026 as a restoration bill for two statutes the General Assembly wrote in 1863 and has never amended: O.C.G.A. § 17-9-4, which declares a void judgment “a mere nullity,” and the miscarriage-of-justice provision now at O.C.G.A. § 9-14-48(d). The bill proposed, among other things, a new trial-court motion through which a void judgment of conviction could be asserted.
Our work for the House Study Committee on Criminal Post-Conviction Litigation refined that position. Since 1967, habeas corpus has been the exclusive proceeding for every constitutional claim that survives direct appeal (Mitchum v. State, 306 Ga. 878 (2019)), and Georgia’s courts have routed the post-appeal void-judgment claim to habeas corpus since McDonald v. State, 126 Ga. 536 (1906) — a routing the Supreme Court reaffirmed in Harper v. State, 286 Ga. 216 (2009). The remedy for a void conviction, in other words, already exists, and it is the writ. What closed it was the four-year filing deadline the General Assembly enacted in 2004. Remove the deadline and the § 17-9-4 right has its court again — without creating any new procedure, office, or right.
That is the single change GPS asks the 2027 session for, and it is carried by one bill:
The Habeas Corpus Restoration Act →
Repeals the four-year habeas deadline — O.C.G.A. § 9-14-42(c) — restoring the courthouse door through which the 1863 statutes are heard. No new rights. No new institutions. No appropriations.
The ineffective-assistance reforms formerly carried in this bill’s Part III — moving those claims to habeas and providing counsel — are the Chief Justice’s own proposals, now before the House Study Committee; they belong to that process. The story of the two 1863 statutes, and how they went dormant, is told in our published investigation, The Sleeping Giants.
The withdrawn bill text remains available on request for the record: info@gps.press.
Georgia Prisoners’ Speak | gps.press | info@gps.press