by Dave Williams | May 15, 2025 | Capitol Beat News Service
ATLANTA – Gov. Brian Kemp has beaten the deadline for signing legislation the General Assembly passed this year with a flurry of bill signing.
Kemp signed 120 bills on Wednesday, including Senate Bill 244, combining provisions from two measures related to the criminal justice system that had failed to gain passage earlier in the session.
The original bill will allow criminal defendants to recover legal costs when their prosecutor is disqualified and the case against them is dismissed.
Majority Republicans crafted the legislation with President Donald Trump in mind. It could pave the way for Trump to recoup his legal costs in the election case brought against him by Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis. The Georgia Court of Appeals disqualified Willis because of a romantic involvement with a special prosecutor she had hired to help her with that case, a ruling she is currently appealing.
The bill was introduced by then-state Sen. Brandon Beach, R-Alpharetta, a staunch Trump supporter who left the General Assembly this month after the president appointed him U.S. treasurer.
While that portion of Senate Bill 244 drew opposition from legislative Democrats, Republican legislative leaders added a second bill to the mix more appealing to Democrats. The second portion of the measure overhauls the system of compensating the wrongly convicted in Georgia.
Originally contained in House Bill 533, it will give innocent people who have been convicted and sent to prison money for the time they spent behind bars. It replaces the current system requiring lawmakers to consider separate compensation resolutions for each wrongly convicted inmate with a hearing before an administrative law judge, who will make a recommendation on compensation to the chief justice of the state Supreme Court.
“This is a landmark moment for justice in Georgia,” said Kristin Verrill, executive director at the Georgia Innocence Project. “Our state has taken a meaningful step toward acknowledging the harm done to innocent people and helping them rebuild their lives.”
Kemp also signed legislation Wednesday that requires police agencies to accept a digital version of Georgia drivers’ licenses.
On Tuesday, the next-to-last day for bill signing, the governor inked a measure expanding the state’s child care tax credit.
“This legislation being signed into law ensures that Georgia’s families have access to affordable and quality childcare, while encouraging more businesses to offer child care,” said Lt. Gov. Burt Jones, who made the issue a priority of his for this year’s General Assembly session.
by Dave Williams | May 14, 2025 | Capitol Beat News Service
ATLANTA – Dozens of Kennesaw State University students demonstrated outside the University System of Georgia offices Wednesday, protesting a decision by the school to terminate its Black Studies degree program.
Opponents characterized the KSU decision as a blow to efforts to promote diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) in the schools. DEI programs have come under fire at the state and federal levels, with the Trump administration pressuring universities to do away with DEI policies and Georgia lawmakers seeking to ban DEI from the state’s schools and colleges.
On Wednesday, demonstrators carried signs with messages including “Black history is American history” and “Diversity Makes America Great.”
To the beat of two snare drums, they chanted slogans. “Who’s afraid of Black and Queer? KSU, they’ve made it clear,” declared one.
The university notified KSU in emails last month that Kennesaw State would be terminating the Black Studies program, along with Philosophy and Technical Communications degrees. The school blamed declining enrollment.
But Simran Mohanty, a junior sociology major at KSU and one of the demonstration’s organizers, said the school undercounted the number of students enrolled in Black Studies because it did not count double majors. She also criticized the process school administrators followed.
“A lot of these decisions were made behind closed doors without input,” she said.
The university system’s Board of Regents has the final say over decisions by member institutions to terminate degree programs. However, the agenda for Thursday’s monthly meeting of the board does not make any reference to KSU’s Black Studies program.
“The University System of Georgia continuously assesses program offerings and curriculum to respond to student and workforce demands,” according to a statement the university system released late Wednesday afternoon. “We require our institutions to examine the average number of degrees awarded in all academic programs and, over the last three years, have approved the termination of over 300 low-producing degree programs.”
The Trump administration has gone after DEI policies on several fronts, including transferring federal funds earmarked for DEI initiatives to law enforcement and threatening elite private universities – notably Harvard – with the loss of federal funding if they continue pursuing DEI.
In Georgia, the Republican-controlled state Senate passed legislation in March calling for withholding state funding from public schools with DEI programs as well as state-administered federal funding from colleges. But the bill died in the Georgia House of Representatives.
by Dave Williams | May 14, 2025 | Capitol Beat News Service
ATLANTA – U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi has appointed Theodore S. Hertzberg to serve as interim U.S. attorney for the Northern District of Georgia, Bondi’s office announced Wednesday.
Hertzberg previously worked as an assistant U.S. attorney for nearly 10 years, beginning with a stint at the Southern District of Georgia’s Savannah office. His duties there included prosecuting violent criminals, drug dealers, fraudsters, and money launderers while also serving as chief of the asset forfeiture section.
After moving to Atlanta in 2018, Hertzberg transferred to the Northern District of Georgia, where he prosecuted gang leaders, child sex predators, gun traffickers, armed felons, and other dangerous offenders.
Before entering the Justice Department, he practiced law in the New York office of Kramer Levin Naftalis & Frankel LLP, and served as a law clerk in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Alabama.
Hertzberg is a graduate of Amherst College and New York University School of Law.
He succeeds Richard Moultrie Jr., who took the job on an acting basis after then-U.S. Attorney Ryan Buchanan resigned in January at the beginning of President Donald Trump’s second term in the White House.
by Dave Williams | May 13, 2025 | Capitol Beat News Service
ATLANTA – Oral arguments in a federal courtroom Tuesday over whether a Texas-based conservative group’s mass voter challenges in Georgia almost five years ago amounted to an attempt to intimidate minority voters boiled down to intent.
A lawyer representing Fair Fight, a voting rights group founded by two-time Democratic gubernatorial nominee Stacey Abrams, told a three-judge panel of the 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals the eligibility challenges of almost 365,000 voters – the largest in the state’s history – lodged by True the Vote was aimed at discouraging voters ahead of two runoff elections in January 2021 that vaulted Democrats Jon Ossoff and Raphael Warnock into the U.S. Senate.
“Georgia has a sordid history of intimidation, of mass challenges,” said Uzoma Nkwonta, a partner in the Elias Law Group, “History is repeating itself.”
Nkwonta argued that the sheer number of “frivolous” challenges mounted against Black voters who were “clearly qualified to vote in Georgia” constituted an attempt to intimidate. He also pointed to press releases True the Vote issued at the time calling attention to the mass challenges and threatening to release the names of those challenged as evidence of the group’s intent at intimidation in violation of the federal Voting Rights Act.
“They were never intended to be legitimate challenges,” Nkwonta said. “This was a stunt in order to intimidate voters.”
But Jake Evans, the lawyer representing True the Vote, said the challenges were not aimed at intimidation.
“If the intent were to intimidate voters … they could have robocalled voters directly,” he said. “No voter ever testified to speaking to True the Vote … or seeing a post of any sort.”
Evans urged the appellate judges to uphold the ruling of U.S. District Judge Steve Jones early last year. The lower court found after hearing from 18 witnesses during seven days of testimony that True the Vote’s actions did not constitute illegal voter intimidation.
But the judges were skeptical. U.S. District Judge Federico Moreno of Florida, one of the panel participants, noted that none of the challenges True the Vote filed were successful.
“Doesn’t that begin to tell you something about the motivation of the challenges?” Moreno asked Evans.
While Jones sided with True the Vote in his January 2024 ruling, he went on to criticize what he called the group’s “reckless” means of compiling the list of voters whose eligibility it questioned.
by Ty Tagami | May 13, 2025 | Capitol Beat News Service
ATLANTA – The penalty for trafficking fentanyl just got more serious in Georgia after Gov. Brian Kemp signed legislation that seeks to suppress illicit sales of the dangerous drug.
When used in a medical setting with proper dosing, the painkiller can help patients experiencing discomfort. But it is 100 times more potent than morphine, according to the U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency, and it can be lethal on the street where it can be found laced with other drugs, such as Adderall, Oxycodone and Xanax.
Two milligrams can kill depending on a person’s body size, tolerance and past usage, according to the DEA, which maintains a memorial exhibit for the drug, which has predominantly killed teenagers.
The Fentanyl Eradication and Removal Act imposes a range of mandatory minimum sentences on convicted traffickers in fentanyl. Four grams to 14 grams, the smallest amounts covered by the legislation – Senate Bill 79 — will result in at least five years behind bars.
Kemp signed the legislation Monday, along with 19 other bills.
Sen. Russ Goodman, R-Cogdell, drove more than eight hours round trip to watch the ceremony. The South Georgia blueberry farmer said Tuesday that he introduced SB 79 because fentanyl is unlike any other drug experienced by older generations. If those older drugs are BB guns, then fentanyl is a nuclear bomb, he said, and teenagers are particularly at risk because they are unaware.
He has many anecdotes from his part of the state — about a medical administrator whose child died after consuming marijuana laced with fentanyl or three young men who took cocaine laced with fentanyl while harvesting crops late one night. Two of them died, Goodman said.
“It’s really gotten personal for me. I’ve met so many people who’ve lost their children.”
