Georgia Supreme Court Presiding Justice David Nahmias
ATLANTA – David Nahmias was unanimously elected by his colleagues on the Georgia Supreme Court Thursday to become the court’s chief justice starting July 1.
Current Chief Justice Harold Melton announced last month that he would be stepping down from the court this summer after serving on the court for 16 years.
Nahmias, currently the court’s presiding justice, was appointed to the state Supreme Court in 2009 by then-Gov. Sonny Perdue to fill a vacancy. Georgia voters then elected Nahmias to a six-year term in 2010 and reelected him in 2016.
Before joining the court, Nahmias was U.S. attorney for the Atlanta-based Northern District of Georgia. Before that, he served as a senior member of the U.S. Justice Department.
The DeKalb County native earned his undergraduate degree at Duke University and his law degree from Harvard Law School, where he served on the Law Review with former President Barack Obama and U.S. Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch. Nahmias went on to serve as a law clerk to the late U.S. Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia.
In his new role as chief justice in Georgia, Nahmias will lead the state’s judicial branch and act as the Supreme Court’s spokesman. He also will chair the Georgia Judicial Council, the policymaking body for the judicial branch.
Georgia chief justices serve one four-year term.
Also on Thursday, the justices unanimously elected Justice Michael Boggs to succeed Nahmias as presiding justice.
The sight of the woman lying on the floor of a windowless jail cell is a something Henry County Judge Brian Amero will never forget.
Pregnant, unresponsive, off her medication and “draped in a paper robe,” the woman had been kept there for several months with scant help for her mental health issues, waiting for a probation hearing. Jail staff tried transferring her to a psychiatric facility but “no one would take her,” Amero said.
“So this is where she sits, this is where she lays, twenty-four hours a day in the dark basement of the jail, in this condition,” said Amero, one of many judges in Georgia hoping to curb how often people with mental health issues wind up in jail rather than treatment settings.
Amero is among dozens of advocates, experts and officials on a state commission studying how to improve Georgia’s mental health system, an underfunded web of agencies and local boards that serve tens of thousands of people with mental illnesses, developmental disabilities and substance addiction.
The Behavioral Health Reform and Innovation Commission held its second meeting last week after forming in 2019 to draw up solutions to the funding, workforce, care access and insurance issues that hamper the state’s mental health services.
Reversing the trend of jails and prisons acting as revolving doors for those with mental health issues is a top challenge facing Georgia’s service providers and law enforcement, both of which often lack enough resources to help people before they experience a preventable crisis that leads to arrest.
Nearly one-fourth of the roughly 53,700 people in state prisons as of January of this year needed treatment for a mental illness, said Georgia Supreme Court Justice Michael Boggs, who serves on the commission and has worked for years on criminal justice reform.
The situation is more dire at county jails such as in South Georgia’s Dougherty County, where Boggs said 209 out of 597 people housed in the jail last January needed mental health services. Those persons tend to stay incarcerated longer than other inmates, depriving them of treatment and increasing jail costs.
“Our jails become the de facto mental health institutions in a lot of our communities,” Boggs said. “It is not only morally unacceptable; it’s financially and otherwise not sustainable.
“We’ve got to do a better job of getting these individuals the treatment they need and not putting them in the county jails.”
Children also face major mental-health challenges in Georgia. Youth admissions to emergency rooms have increased 116% since 2015 with more than half of those children transferring to psychiatric facilities, said Dr. Dan Salinas, chief of community clinical integration at Children’s Healthcare of Atlanta.
Insurance red tape blocks many of those children from receiving help. Children covered under Medicaid in Georgia are often delayed or outright denied admission to residential treatment facilities after hospital stays, said Emily Acker, president and CEO of the nonprofit care provider Hillside.
Acker told commission members last week about a 13-year-old girl named “Rose” who was sex-trafficked by a parent and hospitalized 19 times between two stays at residential treatment facilities, where she was initially denied admission by a Medicaid care management organization.
“In Georgia today, it should not be so difficult to provide a child like Rose the care that she needs and deserves,” Acker said.
Collecting key data on mental health services in Georgia is also an uphill battle. Spotty data on Medicaid claims and local providers participating in state-funded programs make it tough to address care gaps, said Nicoleta Serban, a professor of industrial and systems engineering at Georgia Tech.
“Once we have a good understanding of the supply of services, we can really have a good understanding also of what is the demand that we can cover with the current supply,” Serban said. “I don’t think we have an answer to this question, and it’s a quite challenging question to address.”
Experts and commission members offered up several recommendations to bolster Georgia’s mental health system including more specialized probation supervision, alternative court programs with more treatment-focused sentencing and single-provider Medicaid management through the state.
State Rep. Kevin Tanner, R-Dawsonville, who chairs the commission, said he’ll convene members soon to draft and approve an annual report on recommendations. The commission is set to continue meeting through June of 2023.
The Georgia Supreme Court is headquartered in the Nathan Deal Judicial Center in downtown Atlanta (Photo by Beau Evans)
ATLANTA – The Georgia Supreme Court Monday sided with a group of certified lactation counselors who sued the secretary of state’s office two years ago.
Writing for the court, Justice Michael Boggs ruled that a trial court erred in dismissing the challenge of a state law as unconstitutional.
The 2018 lawsuit stemmed from legislation the General Assembly enacted in 2016 prohibiting the provision of “lactation care and services” for compensation without a state license. The stated purpose of the Georgia Lactation Consultant Practice Act was “to protect the health, safety, and welfare of the public by providing for the licensure and regulation of the activities of persons engaged in lactation care and services.”
In the suit, a nonprofit group of lactation counselors called Reaching Our Sisters Everywhere (ROSE) argued the law made the education and training requirements too stringent, resulting in a reduction of access to lactation care and services, particularly in rural Georgia.
The secretary of state’s office filed a motion to dismiss the suit for failure to state a claim upon which legal relief could be granted. The Fulton County Superior Court granted the motion, finding that ROSE had failed to state a claim because the Georgia Constitution does not recognize a right to work in one’s chosen profession.
But in Monday’s ruling, Boggs agreed with the plaintiffs.
“We have long interpreted the Georgia Constitution as protecting a right to work in one’s chosen profession free from unreasonable government interference,” he wrote.
With Monday’s ruling, the case now goes back to the trial court.
