Private: Our Work

The Georgia Supreme Court vacated the lower court’s ruling which prohibited the State from moving forward with execution warrants for certain pandemic-era death penalty cases until a condition of an agreement between the Attorney General’s Office and the capital defense community that the COVID-19 vaccine is available to all members of the public had been… Read More →

Fulton County Superior Court Judge Robert McBurney halted the December 17 scheduled execution of Stacey Humphreys, on the basis that recently-appointed BPP member Kimberly McCoy had previously served as a victim advocate in the Cobb County District Attorney’s Office at the time of Humphreys’s trial and thus had a conflict of interest. The Board of… Read More →

Governor Brian Kemp signed into law HB 123, after nearly-unanimous support from both houses of the legislature, which provides critical procedural protections for people with intellectual disability who are facing the death penalty in the state. While Georgia was the first state in the county, its previous procedures made it all but impossible to litigate… Read More →

Today, Adrian Hargrove was resentenced to life without the possibility of parole in Richmond County, after his attorneys presented damning evidence of jury discrimination in his trial and in Richmond County historically. Hargrove was on death row for the 2008 murders of Allyson Pederson and her parents.

GRC client Warren King has filed a habeas petition in the Butts County Superior Court based on new evidence that district attorney John Johnson, who has a concerning history of prosecutorial misconduct in death penalty cases, suppressed evidence he had promised the codefendant and key witness against King a deal in exchange for his testimony… Read More →

Patricia McTier recounts her experience as a potential juror in GRC client Warren King’s case, and describes the pretextual reasons the prosecutor used to strike her from serving on his jury. The U.S. Supreme Court is considering his case now.

The State of Georgia executed Willie Pye on March 20th– the first execution in the state in more than four years – despite evidence of his intellectual disability. Though Georgia was the first state in the country to exempt people from intellectual disability from the death penalty, its onerous procedure, including its burden of proof… Read More →

The U.S. Supreme Court is considering whether to take the case of GRC client Warren King, whose prosecutor struck nearly all of the Black people from his jury. As Professor Stephen Bright said, King’s prosecutor was “10 times more likely to strike a Black juror than a White one in King’s case.”

Just 10 days after a jury sentenced him to death in Putnam County, Ricky DuBose was found dead in his cell on death row at the Georgia Diagnostic and Classification Prison in Jackson, in an apparent suicide. He was the youngest person on death row. The GBI is investigating his death.

Ricky DuBose was sentenced to death by a jury in Putnam County, for the murders of corrections officers Curtis Billue and Christopher Monica in 2017. In September 2021, in the first post-pandemic death penalty trial in Georgia, the jury in Mr. DuBose’s codefendant Donnie Rowe’s case rejected the death penalty and sentenced him to life… Read More →

On April 27, 2022, the State of Georgia scheduled the first post-pandemic execution, for Virgil Presnell on May 17, 2022. The Federal Defender Program, which represents Mr. Presnell, filed a breach of contract action against the Attorney General’s Office, on grounds that the Office violated a contract that specified how execution-eligible cases would be scheduled… Read More →