Lines were sparse outside the Cobb County Regional Library voter precinct through noon on Election Day, Nov. 3, 2020. (Photo by Beau Evans)
Bills aimed at scrapping Georgia’s no-excuse absentee voting law and to increase identification requirements to vote by mail advanced in the Georgia Senate Wednesday.
The four bills, which passed by party-line votes out of two separate Senate Ethics Committee subcommittees, marked the first push by top Republican state lawmakers to move a slate of election bills focused on changes to absentee voting.
The most far-reaching measure would halt registered Georgia voters’ ability to vote by mail without providing a reason, ending a practice widely used in the 2020 election cycle by millions of voters wary of exposure to COVID-19 at in-person polling places.
Another bill that passed Wednesday seeks to boost voter ID requirements for requesting and casting absentee ballots, marking changes favored by top-ranking Georgia Republicans including Gov. Brian Kemp and House Speaker David Ralston, R-Blue Ridge.
The bill would require registered voters to provide their date of birth, driver’s license number or other ID card number to request an absentee ballot, overhauling the state’s current system of verifying voter signatures on absentee request forms and ballot envelopes.
Two other measures that cleared Wednesday’s subcommittees would create a new state elections supervisor in charge of training local elections officials and restrict mobile polling places for use only when regular voting sites have lost power or been damaged.
The four bills now head to the full committee for consideration before potentially reaching the Senate floor.
The proposals address many claims former President Donald Trump and his allies made following the 2020 elections of widespread voter fraud that state officials and federal courts rejected as baseless. Trump lost the Nov. 3 election in Georgia to President Joe Biden by 11,779 votes.
Republican lawmakers have called many of the proposed changes necessary to restore voter confidence in the state’s election system and rein in mail-in voting after local elections officials complained they were overwhelmed during the 2020 cycle.
Their push to overhaul the absentee-voting process has been condemned by Democratic lawmakers who have framed the bills as attempts at voter suppression seeking to halt the momentum Democrats have built in recent elections.
Democratic lawmakers also slammed Republican state senators for holding Wednesday’s two subcommittee hearings at 7 a.m. – an unusually early hour for hearings in Georgia legislative sessions – and for not broadcasting the hearings via live-stream video for the public to watch.
“Clearly, we are trying to hide something from the public, the people we answer to,” said state Sen. Elena Parent, D-Atlanta. “This gamesmanship is unacceptable.”
Subcommittee hearings in the state Senate “are not typically streamed unless we have approval from leadership,” said Andrew Allison, director of the Senate Press Office, which is in charge of broadcasting meetings during the session.
The Georgia Senate Republican Caucus also stressed subcommittee meetings are not live-streamed, though the state House of Representatives does broadcast live video of subcommittee meetings.
The Republican caucus punched back at Democrats, saying their complaints “misrepresent election integrity efforts” and bashing the Georgia Senate Democratic Caucus for soliciting donations in a message on Twitter criticizing the election bills.
“Ethics complaints are being considered,” the Republican caucus said.
Gov. Brian Kemp and state lawmakers detailed proposed changes to Georgia’s citizen’s arrest law on Feb. 16, 2021. (Photo by Beau Evans)
ATLANTA – State officials unveiled details of a bipartisan bill Tuesday aimed at revising Georgia’s citizen’s arrest law to limit who can detain someone suspected of a crime.
The first major criminal-justice measure proposed in the 2021 legislative session, sponsored by Rep. Bert Reeves, R-Marietta, would repeal a current Georgia law that broadly allows private citizens to detain someone who commits a crime in their presence or during an escape attempt.
It would still allow owners and employees in businesses including restaurants, as well as security guards and out-of-jurisdiction police officers, to detain those believed to have committed a crime on their property – so long as they’re handed over to local authorities within an hour.
The proposed changes would not affect the state’s stand-your-ground law or any other legal protections for Georgians who seek to reasonably defend themselves from crimes committed against themselves or others, officials stressed at a news conference Tuesday.
“Our bill to overhaul the citizen’s arrest statute is a balanced approach to protecting the lives and livelihoods of ourselves, our friends [and] our neighbors, while also preventing rogue vigilante-ism from threatening the security and God-given potential of all Georgians,” said Gov. Brian Kemp.
Kemp, joined by more than a dozen top state lawmakers from both parties, called the state’s current Civil War-era citizen’s arrest law “an antiquated law that is ripe for abuse.”
He said the bill stems from the killing of Ahmaud Arbery, a Black man who was jogging in a neighborhood outside Brunswick on Feb. 23, 2020, when two white men who suspected him of robbing a nearby home under construction shot him dead while trying to detain him.
The two men, Travis and Gregory McMichael, were arrested months later after protests over police brutality and racial injustice swept across the country and drew attention to the lack of action in the case by coastal Georgia authorities. They have pleaded not guilty, citing the citizen’s arrest law.
Anger over Arbery’s death and protests over the killing of George Floyd by a police officer in Minnesota on May 25, 2020, convinced a bipartisan slate of Georgia lawmakers last June to pass legislation outlawing hate crimes in the state. The citizen’s arrest bill follows up on that measure, Kemp said.
“Like the anti-hate crimes legislation, reforming Georgia’s citizen’s arrest statute is first and foremost about who we are as a state,” Kemp said Tuesday. “In Georgia, we value lives … regardless of race, creed or culture.”
The bill comes as Democratic lawmakers push a wide-ranging package of criminal-justice reform proposals including bans on certain police tactics like no-knock warrants and chokeholds, citizen-led oversight of inquiries into officer-involved shootings and stronger standards for use-of-force training.
Republican lawmakers have taken a less-expansive approach to criminal justice this session, so far filing bills to ease employment challenges for people on probation and carrying out Kemp’s priority to crack down harder on human trafficking.
So far, Reeves’ measure on citizen’s arrests faces the best odds for passing in the Republican-controlled General Assembly, despite wariness by some Democratic leaders to accept the proposed legal protections for business owners to detain suspected criminals.
Rep. Calvin Smyre, D-Columbus, who is the legislature’s longest-serving member, sought to quell concerns from within his party Tuesday by assuring the bill has backing from criminal-justice advocates and has elicited “excitement” from Arbery’s family.
“I think we’re on pretty good footing,” Smyre said after the news conference. “We assured the [Arbery] family and those in Brunswick that citizen’s arrest would be our next move. … It would have been an abdication of our responsibility if we had not touched citizen’s arrest early on in this legislative session.”
The bill also has support from James Woodall, the president of Georgia’s chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, saying he “fully endorses” Reeves’ measure.
“We urge members of both parties and in both chambers to do the same,” Woodall said.
Thousands gathered outside the State Capitol to protest police brutality and racial injustice as lawmakers met for the 2020 legislative session on June 19, 2020. (Photo by Beau Evans)
A bill aimed at preventing Georgia city and county governments from making deep cuts in the budgets of their local police agencies advanced in the Georgia House of Representatives Tuesday.
Sponsored by state Rep. Houston Gaines, R-Athens, the bill would limit local governments from reducing funds for police by more than 5% over a 10-year span. It includes exemptions for smaller jurisdictions and for spending on equipment purchases.
Gaines highlighted recent failed attempts by some Athens and Atlanta elected officials to slice millions of dollars from their police budgets amid protests over police brutality and racial injustice that swept across Georgia and the country last summer.
“These efforts are underway in our state and certainly something I think we need to fight against,” Gaines said. “We all recognize that supporting law enforcement is of the utmost importance and, in my opinion, the most important role that our local governments have.”
Gaines’ bill cleared the House Governmental Affairs General Government Subcommittee on a party-line vote. It heads to the full committee for another vote before potentially moving to the House floor.
The bill comes after last summer’s protests following high-profile killings of Black men by police officers, including the deaths of George Floyd in Minnesota and Rayshard Brooks in Atlanta.
Property destruction and violence at some of those protests sparked a backlash from conservative leaders over a push by some progressive officials to curb police funding, dubbed “defund the police.” The subject took center stage as an issue for both political parties in the 2020 election cycle.
Opposition to the bill came Tuesday from the Georgia Municipal Association and the Association County Commissioners of Georgia (ACCG), which represent city and county governments. Decisions on police funding should be left to local officials, said Todd Edwards, ACCG’s deputy legislative director.
“Police power is one of our inherent or supplemental powers under the constitution,” Edwards said. “We’d like to maintain our flexibility to fund and manage police forces how our local elected officials – those accountable to the public – feel is the best use of taxpayer dollars.”
Thousands gathered outside the State Capitol to protest police brutality and racial injustice as lawmakers met for the 2020 legislative session on June 19, 2020. (Photo by Beau Evans)
State lawmakers are working this year on legislation to change Georgia’s citizen’s arrest law, ban no-knock arrest warrants and lower employment barriers for residents on probation.
But five weeks into the 2021 legislative session, reforming the citizen’s arrest statute appears the most likely criminal justice reform to gain passage.
Their bills range from straight-forward changes such as more training for officers in de-escalation techniques and a ban on using choke holds during arrests, to more complicated overhauls including a citizen-led review board for officer-involved shootings and outlawing private prisons.
Democrats are aiming to build on momentum after state lawmakers passed a bill last summer to boost penalties for hate crimes in Georgia. That bill was nearly tripped up as Republicans sought specific protections for police officers against hate crimes that ended up passing in separate legislation.
With chances slim the bulk of this year’s bills can move in the Republican-controlled state legislature, House Minority Leader James Beverly, D-Macon, said Democrats’ package at least keeps the focus on criminal-justice issues after last summer’s protests over police violence and racial injustice.
“We need to look at criminal justice as a whole and not just one or two things,” Beverly said. “It seems to me that there’s an appetite in Georgia to ask, ‘Are we really doing the right thing?’”
Revisions to the state’s citizen’s arrest law look most likely to gain passage in the General Assembly, Beverly said. The measure stems from the shooting death last year of Ahmaud Arbery, a Black man killed near Brunswick in a confrontation with two white men who tried to detain him while he was jogging.
Proposals for changing the citizen’s arrest law have drawn “potential bipartisan support” so far, Beverly said. Whether Democrats back a bill soon to be sponsored by state Rep. Bert Reeves, R-Marietta, will depend on what degree Georgia citizens could still detain criminal suspects in certain situations.
Reeves, who is one of Gov. Brian Kemp’s floor leaders in the House, declined to comment on his upcoming bill but said details would be announced Feb. 16.
Democrats are also pushing Kemp and Republican lawmakers to join them in backing legislation to ban no-knock warrants, a controversial police tactic that was involved in the death of Breonna Taylor, a Black woman from Louisville, Ky., who was killed in an apartment raid last year.
Passing a ban on no-knock warrants would mark a win for criminal-justice reform advocates, Beverly said. It would also help bolster relations between both parties in the General Assembly as tensions rise over Republican efforts to overhaul Georgia’s absentee voting system that Democrats oppose.
“If you want to do something where you can really get buy-in from my caucus, it would be the no-knock warrant [ban],” Beverly said. “We have members on both sides who agree that those two issues [no-knock warrants and citizen’s arrests] are bad.”
But scrapping no-knock warrants may be a step too far for public safety-minded Republicans concerned about changing laws based on passionate reaction to high-profile deaths like those of Arbery, Taylor and George Floyd in Minnesota last year.
State Sen. Randy Robertson, R-Cataula, a retired major with the Muscogee County Sheriff’s Office, said he was not involved in any no-knock warrants while serving four years on a multi-agency drug task force. Lawmakers should instead continue evaluating the tactic in the recently created Senate Study Committee on Law Enforcement Reform, he said.
“Jumping to conclusions is the worst thing that anybody can do when they feel a crime is committed,” Robertson said Friday. “We are either choosing to ignore logic … or we’re just doing things to say we’re doing them.”
Rather than outlawing certain individual actions, state lawmakers should place more focus on measures to improve de-escalation and other training standards for Georgia police officers that would include routine mental and physical health evaluations, Robertson said.
He noted officers currently receive just 20 hours of touch-up training each year after graduating from the police academy, falling short of the safeguards local agencies need to keep close tabs on officers before crisis situations like improper use-of-force ever happen.
“De-escalation is not a class: It is a thread that runs through every aspect of training,” Robertson said. “Every agency should have a fit-for-duty policy that covers mental and physical fitness.”
Robertson is among several Republican lawmakers to introduce criminal justice-focused legislation this year, though none is as expansive as Democrats’ legislative package. His measure would bar licensing boards from denying business licenses to Georgians on parole or probation for most felony convictions.
Robertson’s bill and another by state Sen. Brian Strickland, R-McDonough, aimed at tightening rules to end or shorten probation terms mark legislation that could help cut down Georgia’s status as the state with the highest rate of residents on probation, said Lisa McGahan, policy director for the nonprofit Georgia Justice Project.
“We have too many people serving under community supervision,” McGahan said. “You can’t access economic opportunity with that handicap.”
Other Republican-sponsored bills McGahan singled out include a measure by state Rep. Mandi Ballinger, R-Canton, to raise the age for youth offenders to be tried in adult court from 17 to 18, as well as two bills protecting human-trafficking victims that passed the state Senate on Thursday.
State Sen. Clint Dixon (R-Buford) discusses his bills on protections for human-trafficking victims in the Georgia Senate chamber on Feb. 11, 2021. (Photo by Beau Evans)
The Georgia Senate passed two bills Thursday aimed at protecting victims of human trafficking, advancing a key plank of Gov. Brian Kemp’s legislative agenda.
One bill sponsored by state Sen. Clint Dixon, R-Buford, would allow human-trafficking victims to sue their traffickers in civil court for monetary damages.
The other bill, also sponsored by Dixon, would shield human-trafficking victims from public scrutiny if they seek to legally change their names by keeping name-change petitions under seal.
Dixon, a freshman who is one of the governor’s floor leaders in the Senate, said the governor-backed bills aim to protect some of the state’s most vulnerable community members.
“This is an issue that’s crucial to my county and yours … and will help victims of human trafficking,” Dixon said.
Both bills passed unanimously and now head to the House for more voting. Kemp will likely sign them into law should they pass the General Assembly.
The governor has made fighting human trafficking a priority since taking office in 2019, charging the Georgia Bureau of Investigation to crack down harder on traffickers through a multi-agency task force. He also tasked his wife, First Lady Marty Kemp, to lead the trafficking-focused GRACE Commission.
Dixon’s bills follow legislation passed last year that toughened penalties for commercial drivers with human-trafficking criminal convictions and allowed victims to clear their court records of any offenses stemming from activities while they were being trafficked.
Kemp’s agenda this year also includes legislation requiring anyone who seeks a new or renewed commercial driver’s license in Georgia to complete a human-trafficking awareness course.
State officials created a new hotline last September for Georgians to alert law enforcement officers of sexual or labor exploitation and to receive help for victims. Thousands of state government employees have also taken a trafficking-awareness course during the past year on how to spot abuse.
The number for the state’s human-trafficking hotline is 1-866-ENDHTGA.
