Georgia Moves to Shield Intellectually Disabled Prisoners from Execution
No Georgia prisoner facing a death sentence has ever been able to prove that he is intellectually disabled beyond a reasonable doubt—an impossibly high bar that no other state has set. It was finally lowered with a new bill signed into law by Gov. Brian Kemp (R) on May 13, 2025.
House Bill (HB) 123 reduces the burden of proof to a preponderance of the evidence, “put[ting] Georgia in line with twenty-six other states that have protections for people with intellectual disability,” according to Southern Center for Human Rights Executive Director Terrica Redfield Ganzy.
Currently, jurors are tasked with determining whether someone is intellectually disabled at the same time they are hearing grizzly details about his crime. The new law bifurcates that process, creating a separate pretrial hearing where a judge makes an intellectual disability determination for defendants charged with a capital crime.
Predicatably, prosecutors fought the separate hearing, while defense attorneys opposed another provision that made it into the final bill adding life without parole (LWOP) as a sentencing option for those found intellectually disabled. As Georgia Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers Executive Director Mazie Lynn Guertin noted, a life sentence under existing law “must be served for a minimum 30 years before a person can even be considered for parole.”
State Rep. Bill Werkheiser (R-Glennville), the bill’s sponsor, chairs the House Industry and Labor Committee. His interest in the state Department of Corrections has taken him on visits to all 35 state prisons, which hold some 47,000 prisoners. He apparently didn’t discover why Georgia, which has a total population similar to Michigan’s, incarcerates almost half again as many prisoners.
Additional source: Georgia Recorder
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