by Ty Tagami | Jul 9, 2025 | Capitol Beat News Service
ATLANTA — People who want to influence Georgia’s next elections have already poured millions of dollars into the 2026 governor’s race and other statewide campaigns.
Campaign finance reports filed by the midnight deadline Tuesday show Lt. Gov. Burt Jones and Attorney General Chris Carr had each attracted about $3 million from donors for their respective gubernatorial campaigns for the first half of the year.
However, Jones exploited a 2021 state law to bolster his campaign by another $10 million. That boost from his own pocket to his WBJ Leadership Committee — he is an executive in a family-owned oil company — put him far ahead of Carr, not to mention the Democrats in contention.
The Republican-sponsored law allows Georgia’s governor and lieutenant governor to raise unlimited sums in leadership committees. Only a handful of others, including leading lawmakers from both parties and the winners of the gubernatorial and lieutenant governor primaries, enjoy the same advantage.
On the Democratic side, former Atlanta Mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms and state Sen. Jason Esteves, a former member of the Atlanta school board, had each raised just more than $1 million. State Rep. Derrick Jackson from Tyrone raised less than a tenth as much.
Carr’s decision to run for governor has led two Republican state senators to contest his seat. Bill Cowsert from Athens and Brian Strickland from McDonough had each raised about half a million dollars. Cowsert brought in about $100,000 more than Strickland, netting $531,000. No Democrat reported raising money for that race.
Jones’ bid for governor has led four state senators to raise money to campaign for lieutenant governor. As in the governor’s contest, Republicans held a commanding lead.
Steve Gooch, a Dahlonega Republican who recently stepped down as the Senate’s majority leader, raised $1 million. John F. Kennedy of Macon, who outranked Gooch as the Senate’s president pro tempore until he also stepped down, raised $819,000. And Sen. Blake Tillery, R-Vidalia, who chairs the Senate Appropriations Committee, gathered $759,000.
Tillery has not yet formally announced his bid for lieutenant governor, but his campaign said that will happen in the coming weeks.
The only Democrat to raise six figures for the lieutenant governor’s contest was Sen. Josh McLaurin of Sandy Springs, who drew $118,000 in contributions.
by Ty Tagami | Jul 9, 2025 | Capitol Beat News Service
ATLANTA – About 66,000 Georgians will get cancer this year, and 19,000 of them will die.
That sobering estimate by the American Cancer Society explains why state lawmakers decided to study the disease this summer in an attempt to reduce the rate.
“We are above the average for the nation,” Dr. Jorge Cortes, director of the Georgia Cancer Center at Augusta University, told legislators assembled at his university Wednesday. Cortes said Georgians are getting – and dying from – lung, prostate, breast and colorectal cancer at rates exceeding the national average.
Cancer is the second leading cause of death in Georgia, according to testimony from the state Department of Community Health (DCH). It is the number one killer of people ages 1-19, said Dr. Doug Graham, chief of the Aflac Cancer and Blood Disorders Center at Children’s Healthcare of Atlanta.
What can lawmakers do about it?
For one thing, they can knock down barriers to cancer screening.
At prior hearings of the House Study Committee on Cancer Care Access in May and June, they learned that cancer care is hard to come by in rural areas, as the medical payments system squeezes smaller service providers. Rising costs and inadequate transportation contribute to lack of access to care.
The later cancer is detected, the deadlier it gets. It also becomes costlier to treat, driving up health-care costs for everyone.
Lawmakers heard repeatedly about how medical industry consolidation is exacerbating lack of access by forcing patients to drive farther to find a specialist.
Dr. Harsha Vyas, who has a small medical office in Dublin, asked study committee members to address what he sees as a systemic problem in the pharmaceutical and insurance industries: pharmacy benefit managers, or PBMs.
“They’re middlemen in the health-care system created by insurance companies,” Vyas said. “They dictate all sorts of things they shouldn’t be dictating. … Just three PBMs control 80% of the drug market in the country. If that’s not monopoly, I don’t know what else is.”
Vyas said insurers have too much control over what doctors prescribe though a system called pre-authorization, and he said reimbursement rates for clinics like his are too low.
“We need to keep them accountable,” he said. “I can’t call them to the table. “You guys can, and you’ve got to ask them the tough questions.”
No insurance companies were represented at Wednesday’s hearing, but a DCH staffer explained how Medicaid is managed in Georgia through contracts with management companies.
Graham, from Children’s Healthcare, said cancer in children is connected with genetic syndromes, birth defects and maternal age. But there are other correlations that are within parents’ control: breastfeeding and maternal vitamins are associated with reduced child cancer risk.
Rep. Lee Hawkins, R-Gainesville, the committee’s chairman, said he and other lawmakers are working on drug pricing and other issues. He wrapped up the committee’s listening tour by saying the General Assembly will continue to study cancer care access.
“I think we’re just at the beginning and scratching the surface of what we can do,” he said.
by Ty Tagami | Jul 8, 2025 | Capitol Beat News Service
ATLANTA — Dwan Maurice Hewlett must have thought he was about to make a lucrative deal when he drove to an Athens gas station.
His car was filled with fentanyl and other drugs, in baggies ready to go.
Instead, he wound up sprinting down the road, in a hapless attempt to evade police officers.
A confidential informant had lured Hewlett, 41, to the location on Danielsville Road on behalf of the Athens-Clarke County Police Department, said William R. “Will” Keyes, U.S. Attorney for the Middle District of Georgia.
“Cases like this highlight the strong collaboration between our office and our local, state and federal law enforcement partners,” Keyes said.
Hewlett, also known as “LA,” was sentenced Monday to serve 420 months in prison to be followed by 10 years of supervised release. He was found guilty at trial in February of conspiracy to possess with intent to distribute methamphetamine, fentanyl and cocaine, not to mention actual possession with intent to distribute plus a couple of counts involving firearms.
The man from Hull on the northeast edge of Athens had a .380 pistol under his driver’s seat. Officers also recovered baggies with drugs ready to go: 133.51 grams of fentanyl, 58.31 grams of methamphetamine, 9.783 grams of cocaine and 16 grams of cocaine base.
A search of cell phones that Hewlett had in the car revealed drug-related messages and photos, indicating that he was conspiring to distribute two kilograms of fentanyl just days prior to his arrest, the U.S. Attorney’s Office said. Hewlett had three prior convictions in the Clarke County Superior Court in cases involving drugs and firearms.
When Hewlett pulled into that gas station, Athens-Clarke officers boxed his vehicle in and exited their undercover vehicles wearing “POLICE” marked body armor.
After they told Hewlett to get out of his car, he reached under his seat and then sort of complied. He left his car, but ignored the cops, taking off on foot. He couldn’t outrun them, though.
“This armed career criminal will no longer be selling the dangerous drug fentanyl in our community,” Athens-Clarke County Police Chief Jerry Saulters said.
by Ty Tagami | Jul 7, 2025 | Capitol Beat News Service
ATLANTA — A committee created by the Georgia Supreme Court is recommending that the state try letting people with special legal training do limited kinds of attorney work that would give more people access to the justice system.
A three-year pilot program in three parts of the state — rural, urban, and a mid-sized community — would allow the legal community to experiment with expanding legal practice “into new areas with the urgent unmet legal needs of low-income and rural Georgians,” said the report, which was released Monday by the high court’s Study Committee on Legal Regulatory Reform.
In the program, Limited Licensed Legal Practitioners (LLLPs) would be authorized to give legal assistance to landlords and tenants and people with consumer-debt issues. The LLLPs’ would focus on general legal guidance and preparing and drafting forms and documents but would be prohibited from appearing in court or contacting other parties.
“This limited assistance has the potential to make a significant impact in specific classes of cases that are generally high volume, relatively less complex, and involve significant numbers of self-represented parties,” wrote the committee, which was established last year and led by state Supreme Court Justice Carla Wong McMillian.
The committee also recommended letting attorneys collect legal training credit hours for pro bono (free) work. The report noted that some states — including neighboring states Alabama, Florida and Tennessee — give continuing legal education credit for pro bono work. Such ongoing training is required to maintain a license to practice law.
As part of its work, the committee surveyed lawyers. Out of more than 2,200 who responded, more than half agreed that non-attorneys could help address “the civil justice gap,” the report said, although slightly fewer than half were “generally supportive” of the idea.
Even so, the committee pitched the idea to the high court, saying early access to legal services could lead to fewer legal disputes winding up in court.
LLLPs would get training in procedural and substantive law, with an emphasis on ethics and professionalism. There would be a written exam, written portfolio assessment, and observation and shadowing.
The committee noted that the Minnesota Supreme Court recently adopted recommendations from a similar three-year program there called the Legal Paraprofessionals Pilot Project.
The Minnesota pilot was limited to landlord-tenant and family cases, but the recommendation that followed the trial program was to let paraprofessionals provide legal assistance in more legal areas.
Georgia’s committee said these legal helpers could give more people access to the courts.
“The committee finds that the proposed pilot program would increase access to justice for low-income and rural Georgians while protecting the public,” the report said.
by Ty Tagami | Jul 3, 2025 | Capitol Beat News Service
ATLANTA — It started harmlessly enough, with kids using artificial intelligence to cheat on their writing assignments, but the technology has become a palpable threat to society as lawyers and others in the justice system have conducted novel experiments with it and even clearly misused it.
In the five years since OpenAI unleashed Chat GPT-3 on the public, people have found creative and sometimes unwise uses for the technology, including attorneys who harnessed it to write briefs with fake citations.
Recognizing the risk, the Georgia Supreme Court undertook a 10-month review in August and released new recommendations on Thursday. The state’s high court proposes a three-year process to adapt to AI.
It will start with establishing leadership and governance and conclude with new policies and processes for all the courts in Georgia’s judicial system. There will be community engagement, process reviews, education and training, and the establishment of business and technology architectures along the way.
The committee behind the new report, “Artificial Intelligence and Georgia’s Courts,” was led by Justice Andrew A. Pinson. It incorporates observations by the State Bar of Georgia’s Board of Governors, who produced their own report on the risks of AI in early June.
The bar’s report said revisions to a rule of conduct for lawyers was “particularly critical” because it was about their competence and proficiency with technology.
“It is the committee’s assessment GenAI tools will in short order become ubiquitous,” the bar report’s authors wrote.
Pinson’s committee cited numerous examples of AI uses that occurred just during the 10 months of their review process, such as the Indiana Supreme Court’s introduction of AI for voice-to-text transcriptions, the Arizona Supreme Court’s use of AI avatars to deliver news about rulings by their justices, and a family’s use of AI to create a victim impact statement by their dead relative during the sentencing phase of the trial over his road rage death.
“A key challenge the committee faced during its work is the rapidly evolving nature of a technology new to courts and organizations across the country,” Pinson’s committee concluded.
The panel noted acceptable uses for AI such as for research and scheduling, unacceptable uses such as for jury selection and “black box” sentencing algorithms, and potential uses that need more study and testing such as language translation and sentencing and risk assessments.
