ATLANTA (Georgia Recorder) — The Georgia House passed a bill Wednesday that seeks to overhaul the compensation process allowing the state to pay wrongfully convicted Georgians, a system that has long relied on individual resolutions to pay people who were locked up and later exonerated.
Republican lawmakers in the state House prevailed in a contentious 244-61 vote after legislators spliced itonto a bill aimed at allowing criminal defendants to recoup their legal costs if the prosecuting attorney in their case is disqualified for personal or professional misconduct.
The original wrongful compensation bill, House Bill 533, stalled in the House on Crossover Day, March 7, passing out of the chamber’s Judiciary Non-Civil Committee but never appearing on the floor for a vote. Previous versions of the bill have faced fierce opposition in the Senate, particularly by Sen. Randy Robertson, a Cataula
Republican and former law enforcement officer who has repeatedly raised questions about the innocence of convicts who he says could be exonerated by the courts on a legal technicality. But attached to Senate Bill 244, which the bill’s lead sponsor Sen. Brandon Beach said is inspired by President Donald Trump’s election interference case in Georgia, it may face a smoother path to success.
The Genesis of the Wrongful Conviction Compensation Act
As one of only a few states without a designated statute in place to compensate wrongfully convicted citizens, Georgia’s wrongfully incarcerated residents face an uphill battle when attempting to secure compensation.
That’s on top of the already complex, often yearslong process prisoners must undertake in order to get a conviction overturned. Once they’ve secured their freedom, those who have been wrongfully convicted must then find a state representative who is willing to sponsor an individual compensation resolution for them and file a claim with Georgia’s Claims Advisory Board. For any claims over $5,000 — which encompasses most, if not all wrongful conviction cases — the advisory board will then make a recommendation to the legislature, which apportions compensation funds as part of the annual state budget.
“Certainly, this process is not meant for wrongful conviction,” said Maggie Hasty, who oversees claims for the Secretary of State’s office. “It is meant for people who have monetary claims against state agencies.”
Following the Advisory Board’s recommendations, those resolutions then go through the full legislative process and must pass committees and floor votes in both the House and Senate before they can take effect.
Advocates have criticized the current system, arguing that it results in unequal treatment between exonerees and subjects individual compensation resolutions to legislators’ political whims. But under the language in HB 533, sponsored by Rome Republican Rep. Katie Dempsey, the pathway would be streamlined. The bill would establish a new process under Georgia state law for people who have been exonerated, allowing administrative law judges — rather than the Claims Advisory Board — to rule on wrongful conviction compensation cases. It would also award a standardized rate of $75,000 for each year of incarceration to each exoneree, with an additional $25,000 added for each year spent on death row.
For Dempsey, who sponsored two individual compensation resolutions for residents of Floyd County in addition to the Wrongful Conviction Compensation Act, “a wrongful conviction is unimaginable.”
“I often put myself in those shoes — because it could happen to any of us, or our children, or someone we love or care about,” she said, adding, “I wouldn’t last ten minutes in prison and you all know that. I would need a lot more than money to make me whole.”
For the five citizens hoping to seek compensation this year, however, time may already have run out. On Crossover Day, lawmakers combined five individual compensation resolutions into House Resolution 128, which passed overwhelmingly in the House but did not receive a hearing on the Senate side until Tuesday, after the deadline to add it to the Senate calendar had passed. The Senate Appropriations Subcommittee on Compensation, which Robertson chairs, began its hearing at 6 a.m. on Tuesday morning, ultimately concluding after more than four hours of testimony without a final vote.
“We rush too many things through this building without having legitimate, deep-dive conversations about it,” Robertson said, comparing the combined bill to a “bastard son.”
Democrats split between aiding wrongfully convicted and President Trump
For House Democrats, who have overwhelmingly supported compensating those who are wrongfully convicted in previous bienniums, the marriage between the wrongful conviction act and a bill aimed at compensating President Donald Trump presented a philosophical dilemma.
According to state Sen. Brandon Beach, an Alpharetta Republican and staunch Trump ally who was recently appointed by the president to serve as U.S. Treasurer, SB 244 was directly inspired by Trump’s election interference case in Georgia, in which Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis was disqualified after an appeals court judge found that her romantic relationship with special prosecutor Nathan Wade created a “‘significant’ appearance of impropriety.” Under SB 244, attorney’s fees and other costs would come out of county prosecutors’ budgets, which Democrats fear could have a disproportionate impact on smaller counties with more limited budgets, and discourage prosecutors from tackling complex or high-profile cases.
In a scathing Minority Report, state Rep. Shea Roberts, an Atlanta Democrat, condemned the combination of the two pieces of legislation.
“I wanted to believe that we were better than this,” she said. “I held out hope that the majority party in this chamber would not use its legislative power for blatant political retribution. And tacking the Wrongfully Incarcerated Compensation bipartisan bill that our colleagues have worked tirelessly to pass for years onto this punitive SB 244 makes me physically sick.”
The bill would also directly benefit a sitting legislator: Sen. Shawn Still, a Johns Creek Republican, was indicted in the Fulton County election interference case alongside Trump and 17 other codefendants. If the bill passes, he too may be able to recoup the cost of his legal fees.
But state Rep. Scott Holcomb, an Atlanta Democrat who sponsored two previous versions of the Wrongful Conviction Compensation Act, urged his colleagues to vote in favor of the bill.
The current compensation process “has been candidly broken for a very, very long time,” he said. “What it leads to is inconsistent results: some people get compensation, some people don’t. Some people get a certain amount of compensation, some people get less, some people get more.”
He also highlighted the repeated issues he’s faced getting the Senate to consider any form of compensation for the wrongfully convicted.
“What’s happened since 2022 is no resolutions have moved, period, in the senate,” he said. “They haven’t entertained them, they haven’t considered them. Last year they didn’t even have hearings for measures that were passed here.”
Though the vast majority of Democrats voted against the bill, Holcomb and Dempsey are optimistic that combining the two bills will improve their chances of establishing change by the end of the 2025 legislative session.
“I don’t like being sideways with the majority of my caucus,” Holcomb said after the bill passed on the House floor. “But at the same token, when all is said and done, and when I leave this building for good, there’s going to be very few things that I’ve worked on that will have been incredibly consequential. This will be one of them, and so I had to continue to support it, and I’ll continue to support it, and I really hope that it gets to the finish line this year.”
The legislation now returns to the Senate, which must agree to the amended House version before the bill can advance to the governor’s desk.
