News

Lawyers for Rodney Young, a man on Georgia’s death row, have asked the Georgia Supreme Court to find the state’s requirement that people facing the death penalty must prove intellectual disability beyond a reasonable doubt unconstitutional, following the United States Supreme Court decisions in Hall v. Florida and Moore v. Texas. While Georgia was the… Read More →

After conducting an exhaustive search of death sentences since 1973, the Death Penalty Information Center added Howard Jackson Stack to its list of people who were exonerated after being sent to death row. After a reversal by the Georgia Supreme Court, the charges against Mr. Slack were dismissed in 1975. Mr. Slack’s case brings the… Read More →

Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, who, along with Justice Stephen Breyer, had called for the U.S. Supreme Court to consider anew the constitutionality of the death penalty, passed away due to complications with cancer. Prior to her service on the U.S. Supreme Court, as a lawyer with the ACLU, Justice Ginsburg authored an amicus brief in… Read More →

Today, Willie Palmer is no longer under a death sentence, after nearly 25 years on death row, by agreement between the parties, for another sentencing trial in Burke County. He will no longer face the death penalty. The Resource Center represented Mr. Palmer in his state post-conviction proceedings following his first trial in 1997, and… Read More →

A new study of Georgia’s death penalty system finds even more racial disparities in the imposition of the ultimate punishment. Building on the well-known Baldus Study, which showed that people who had killed white victims were four times more likely to receive the death penalty than people who had killed Black victims, researchers Scott Phillips… Read More →

The Atlanta-Journal Constitution highlights the pattern of misconduct by Brunswick Judicial Circuit prosecutor John Johnson, including in the death penalty cases of former Georgia Resource Center clients Larry Jenkins, Larry Lee, and Jimmy Meders.

Longtime GRC partner Murphy Davis released her memoir Surely Goodness and Mercy, describing her decades-long struggle against cancer. Ms. Davis is a Presbyterian minister who, along with her husband Ed Loring, ran the Open Door Community in Atlanta (now based in Baltimore). As part of her ministry, Ms. Davis served dozens of people on Georgia’s… Read More →

Johnny Gates, who served more than 26 years on death row and 43 years in prison, for a 1977 Muscogee County murder, was released from prison today. Mr. Gates always maintained his innocence for the crime. In March, the Georgia Supreme Court affirmed the reversal of Mr. Gates’s conviction so that he could conduct DNA… Read More →

Hours before his scheduled execution, the Board of Pardons and Paroles commuted the death sentence of Jimmy Meders to life without parole –  the first commutation by the Board in more than six years. The Board was moved by the fact that every living juror to serve on Mr. Meders’s trial would have voted for… Read More →

The State of Georgia executed Donnie Lance for the 1997 murder of his ex-wife and her boyfriend, despite lingering questions about his guilt. Mr. Lance had sought DNA testing to prove his innocence, but his efforts were opposed by the prosecution, and denied by the courts. His and his ex-wife’s adult children opposed his execution… Read More →

The State of Georgia executed Ray Cromartie for the 1994 murder of convenience store clerk Richard Slysz, despite concerns that he was not the shooter in the crime. (His codefendant, who may have been the shooter, was released from prison years ago.) Before his execution, Mr. Cromartie sought, unsuccessfully, DNA testing to prove that he… Read More →

Lawrence Jefferson, who had been on Georgia’s death row for 33 years for the 1985 murder of Edward Taulbee in Cobb County, won a new sentencing hearing from the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit. The unanimous panel found that Mr. Jefferson had not received the effective assistance of counsel because his lawyers… Read More →