Georgia lawmakers finally OK system to pay wrongfully convicted with Trump election case rider added

Yahoo

05-04-2025

Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis announced indictments against former President Donald Trump and his allies at a press conference with Special Prosecutor Nathan Wade standing to her left. Ross Williams/Georgia Recorder
The Georgia Senate approved a bill Friday that allows criminal defendants to recoup their legal costs if the prosecuting attorney in their case is disqualified for personal or professional misconduct, a description that recalls the Fulton County prosecutor who brought felony charges against President Donald Trump.
Next stop is Gov. Brian Kemp's desk for a signature.
Senate Bill 244, originally inspired by Trump's election interference case in Georgia, was later amended to revive the Wrongful Conviction Compensation Act, a stalled bill that was aimed at providing reparations to people wrongfully incarcerated.
House lawmakers on both sides of the aisle have faced an uphill battle in their efforts to properly compensate those who have been wrongfully incarcerated. The process is currently done on a case-by-case basis through individual compensation resolutions that must pass through the full legislative process like any other bill. Legislation to standardize the process was initially introduced by Atlanta Democratic Rep. Scott Holcomb in 2022, and re-introduced in 2023, but his efforts have repeatedly been stalled in the Senate by Republican opposition.
The version that ultimately emerged as the clock ran out on the 2025 legislative session Friday, sponsored by Alpharetta Republican Sen. Brandon Beach, secured a 35-18 vote in its second pass through the Senate, with all Republicans and the three highest-ranking Senate Democrats voting in support of the legislation. Its passage also marked a final Sine Die gavel for Beach, a staunch Trump ally who was recently appointed by the president to serve as U.S. Treasurer.
If Gov. Brian Kemp signs the bill into law, it will allow criminal defendants to recoup their legal costs from county prosecuting attorneys' budgets in cases where the prosecutor is disqualified for personal or professional misconduct. (During Trump's election interference case in Georgia, 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.')
Separately, it will establish a new process under Georgia state law for people who have been convicted for crimes they did not commit and later exonerated, allowing administrative law judges to rule on wrongful conviction compensation cases and awarding 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.
This is the third consecutive biennium that legislators in the House have attempted to reform the system for compensating those who have been wrongfully incarcerated. However, Republican opposition in the Senate — particularly from Sen. Randy Robertson, a Cataula Republican and former law enforcement officer — has repeatedly stalled those efforts. Under current Georgia law, those who have been wrongfully convicted must 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. 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, but those efforts too have routinely died in the Senate in recent years.
Though Robertson emphasized that he was still not fully on board with the legislation aimed at compensating the wrongfully convicted, he conceded that the current system was in need of reform in a speech on the final day of the 2025 legislative session.
'What I realized is the process is not a good process,' Robertson said, but vowed to continue workshopping the wrongful conviction component of the bill after the 2025 legislative session concludes.
'I'm going to ask you today to support the Senator from the 21st and vote for this legislation, and in the off-season, we'll tackle the other thing that's attached to it and we'll come up with a process that works,' he continued, addressing his Senate colleagues. 'Support this bill, get it across, and I promise you the fight's not over.'
Democrats also condemned the original language of the bill, arguing that it could have a disproportionate impact on smaller counties with more limited budgets, and discourage prosecutors from tackling complex or high-profile cases.
But Rep. Scott Holcomb, an Atlanta Democrat who has championed the wrongful conviction overhaul over the past three bienniums and sponsored two previous iterations of the bill, celebrated its passage.
'This will give hope to real people whose lives were devastated and destroyed by a wrongful conviction, and it gives them a path to get some measure of compensation so they can restart their lives,' he said. 'I'm very grateful for that. This is a major legislative achievement that comes out of this session.'
Though he acknowledged that there is no way to fully undo a wrongful conviction, he hopes that the new system will bring equality and efficiency to the process.
'There isn't a person alive who would trade the money that these individuals are receiving for what happened to them in terms of being locked up in our state's prisons, for usually for decades of their lives for something that they didn't do,' he said. 'This is a path to provide some remedy. It's an inadequate remedy in terms of nothing can bring back those years, but it's an adequate remedy in terms of dollars that will really help them through the remaining years of their lives.'