by Ty Tagami | Apr 4, 2025 | Capitol Beat News Service
ATLANTA – Georgia lawmakers approved legislation late Friday that would give innocent people who were convicted and sent to prison money for the time they spent behind bars, while also allowing defendants to recover legal costs when their prosecutor is disqualified and the case against them is dismissed.
Senate Bill 244 passed the Georgia Senate last month as a measure that only allowed defendants to recoup attorney fees and court costs when the case against them is dismissed following the disqualification of their prosecutor over improper conduct.
Then on Wednesday, the state House of Representatives added an amendment that would pay inmates $75,000 per year of incarceration when their conviction is reversed or vacated or they are pardoned. Those awaiting a death sentence would get $100,000 per year.
The bill, when it was only about attorney fees, had passed unanimously in the Senate, with Democrats backing it even though it could allow President Donald Trump and his co-defendants to recoup their legal costs in the election case brought against them by Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis.
Willis acknowledged romantic involvement with a prosecutor she had hired to help her with that case, and the Georgia Court of Appeals disqualified her.
When Sen. Brandon Beach, R-Alpharetta presented the amended measure on the Senate floor Friday evening, a Democrat brought up Trump’s call to Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger when Trump sought 11,780 votes after he lost the 2020 election.
“If the Supreme Court dismisses it, you don’t think those 15 defendants have some kind of right to get some compensation?” responded Beach, an ardent Trump supporter whom the president recently tapped to be U.S. Treasurer.
Sen. RaShaun Kemp, D-Atlanta, said, “We should not pay Donald Trump’s legal fees for trying to break the laws of this state.”
The measure then passed 35-18, with the support of a few Democrats, sending it to Gov. Brian Kemp for his signature.
by Dave Williams | Apr 4, 2025 | Capitol Beat News Service
ATLANTA – Gov. Brian Kemp signed controversial religious freedom legislation Friday aimed at preventing government intrusion into Georgians’ rights to exercise their religious beliefs.
The General Assembly’s Republican majorities passed the Religious Freedom Restoration Act on Wednesday primarily along party lines.
“It’s common-sense legislation,” Kemp said after signing Senate Bill 36. “Georgians still remain the place where there’s no place for hate.”
The bill closely mirrors a federal RFRA law Congress passed back in 1993. However, the U.S. Supreme Court declared in 1997 that the law only applied to the federal government, which has left Georgia lawmakers pushing for years for a state-level RFRA.
Legislative Democrats opposed the bill, arguing it could be used to discriminate against non-Christians and LGBTQ Georgians.
But Republicans defended the measure as applying only to acts by the state and local governments, not to actions by private citizens aimed at other private citizens.
On Friday, Kemp said the RFRA bill builds on past efforts targeting discrimination in Georgia, including a hate-crimes law the General Assembly passed following the murder of Black jogger Ahmaud Arbery near Brunswick by two white men in 2020 and last year’s bill aimed at antisemitism.
RFRA has been championed for years in the legislature almost single-handedly by state Sen. Ed Setzler, R-Acworth, unsuccessfully until this year’s session.
by Dave Williams | Apr 4, 2025 | Capitol Beat News Service
ATLANTA – The Georgia House of Representatives passed legislation Friday aimed at a gun ordinance the Savannah City Council passed last year.
The ordinance prohibits storing firearms in unlocked vehicles, with violators subject to a $1,000 fine and 30 days in jail.
While House Republicans opposed the ordinance on its merits as infringing on gun owners’ Second Amendment rights, much of Friday’s debate centered around GOP arguments that state law preempts local ordinances.
“Municipalities are a creation of this body,” said House Majority Leader Chuck Efstration, R-Mulberry. “If they are circumventing the laws of this state, it needs to be corrected.”
Rep. Anne Allen Westbrook, D-Savannah, defended the city’s right to pass an ordinance regulating guns, arguing council members in her city saw the need to discourage motorists from leaving their guns unlocked. She said 266 firearms were reported stolen from vehicles in Savannah last year, with 228 taken from unlocked vehicles.
“We are a city that is visited by people from all over the world,” Westbrook said. “We want you to have a good time. … We’re just asking that people lock their cars. Is that unreasonable to ask?”
But Rep. Alan Powell, R-Hartwell, who presented Senate Bill 204 on the House floor, said the Savannah ordinance doesn’t go after the right target, criminals who steal guns.
“Why would a city pass a law to penalize someone who is a victim of a crime?” Powell asked his House colleagues. “That’s not justice.”
Senate Bill 204 declares that regulating firearms is an issue of “general, statewide concern” and prohibits local governments from stepping in to regulate them.
The House passed the bill 99-74 late Friday afternoon along party lines, sending it back to the Senate, where it originated. Senators were expected to vote on final passage of the measure Friday night, with the General Assembly facing a midnight deadline to wrap up the 2025 legislative session.
by Dave Williams | Apr 4, 2025 | Capitol Beat News Service
ATLANTA – Georgia lawmakers gave final passage Friday to a $37.7 billion fiscal 2026 state budget that prioritizes spending on education and prisons.
After the state Senate passed the spending plan 54-1, the Georgia House of Representatives followed suit 170-5.
A key line item the House and Senate had disagreed on before a joint conference committee crafted a final version of the budget was how much money to allocate to kick start Georgia’s private school voucher program, which the General Assembly created last year. In the end, the conferees approved Gov. Brian Kemp’s recommendation to fully fund the new program with $141 million.
About 10,000 students have applied for vouchers, although the program doesn’t begin until July, House Appropriations Committee Chairman Matt Hatchett, R-Dublin, said on the House floor Friday. Of that number, 5,100 have been deemed eligible for the program, he said.
The budget also includes $300 million to fully fund the state’s Quality Basic Education K-12 student funding formula. It contains $108.9 million in state grants to help local school systems pay for safety improvements on their school campuses, which will provide each school with $47,124.
Another $19.6 million is earmarked for a new program called “student support services,” which will include mental-health counselors for the schools, and $15.3 million will go to support economically disadvantaged students through a one-time pilot program.
The school-safety and mental-health services funding are in response to the school shooting at Apalachee High School in Barrow County last September that killed two students and two teachers.
Also in the education arena, the budget provides $18.5 million to hire 116 literacy coaches who will work to improve reading scores.
State policymakers have made conditions inside Georgia prisons a top concern after a federal audit released last fall criticized the prison system for failing to protect inmates from violence. The fiscal ’26 spending plan, increases spending on the Georgia Department of Corrections by $200 million, $75 million above what Kemp recommended in the budget he presented to the General Assembly in January.
“(Corrections) Commissioner (Tyrone Oliver) has been a good partner, always picking up the phone when needed,” Hatchett, said.
That $200 million spending increase for the prison system includes $13.4 million to give correctional officers 4% pay raises and $45 million to hire an additional 700 guards to better protect inmates by lowering the inmate-to-staff ratios. Another $34.2 million is allocated for repairing deteriorating prison infrastructure.
The budget conferees were able to draw down additional funds for education and prisons at the 11th hour, when Kemp raised his revenue estimate for fiscal 2026 this week by $50.4 million.
In the area of health care, the budget includes $16.9 million to increase reimbursement rates for providers serving Medicaid patients and $7.4 million for graduate medical education to help address shortages of health-care providers, particularly in rural Georgia.
The budget now heads to Kemp for his signature. Fiscal 2026 takes effect July 1.
by Ty Tagami | Apr 4, 2025 | Capitol Beat News Service
ATLANTA – The families of teachers killed in mass shootings and other violent acts at school would get double the money under legislation that has passed both chambers of the Georgia General Assembly.
The House of Representatives voted unanimously Friday to approve the Senate’s changes to House Bill 105 and send the bill to Gov. Brian Kemp for his signature.
The measure would double to $150,000 the compensation to loved ones when teachers and other public school employees are killed “in the line of duty.”
This would put indemnification for teachers in parity with that of police officers killed on the job.
It’s an acknowledgement of the growing risk of violence in schools after two teachers and two students were killed in a mass shooting at Apalachee High last September, with nine others injured.
The Senate amendment that needed House approval added a requirement that the State Board of Workers’ Compensation inform injured police officers when they are eligible to apply to a fund that covers the difference between full pay and workers compensation while recovering.
Workers’ comp covers only two-thirds of their pay, said Sen. Brian Strickland, R-McDonough, adding that Kemp had agreed to the amendment to HB 105, which Strickland characterized as one of the governor’s bills.
