The Georgia Legislature ended its 2023 legislative session on March 28, 2023, without passing bills aimed at providing compensation for individuals who were wrongfully incarcerated in the state. The Legislature’s failure to act means that Georgia will remain one of only 13 jurisdictions without any statute that provides any monetary compensation for victims of wrongful convictions. That means that individuals who were wrongfully convicted in Georgia will largely be on their own in picking up the pieces of their lives after their exoneration.
Most states have statutes on the books that provide some measure of compensation to those who were wrongfully incarcerated, usually upon a showing of a grant of a pardon of innocence or a judicial determination of innocence. For instance, in North Carolina, exonerees who are declared innocent of the crimes for which they were wrongfully convicted are entitled to receive $50,000 per year for each year of wrongful incarceration, capped at $750,000.
Georgia is one of only 13 jurisdictions in the United States that has no statutory provision to provide any monetary relief to exonerees, some who have been incarcerated for decades. Senate Bill 429 would have addressed that by establishing a panel of appointees with expertise in criminal justice and wrongful convictions. That panel would have been tasked with screening compensation claims and establishing guidelines to determine who would qualify. The panel’s recommendations would then go before the Chief Justice of the Georgia Supreme Court for approval.
Senate Bill 429 did not advance in the Georgia Legislature. Also, individual bills focused on providing some measure of compensation to six recent Georgia exonerees were not taken up. A recent article in The Atlanta Journal-Constitution focused on those legislative efforts. Pictured, from left to right, are Lee Clark, Terry Talley, and Joey Watkins, men who were wrongfully incarcerated for 25 years, 39 years, and 22 years, respectively, and who would have been entitled to some form of compensation if the bills under consideration had become law.
