The Georgia Public Defender Standards Council has pub­lished an analy­sis of death penal­ty cas­es in the state dur­ing the past 30 years. The report was writ­ten by Michael Mears, Director of the Council. The review exam­ines the mod­ern his­to­ry of Georgia’s death penal­ty, and pro­vides data sort­ed in a num­ber of ways, includ­ing by coun­ty, cir­cuit, and defen­dant. It also pro­vides the fol­low­ing sum­ma­ry of the dis­po­si­tions of Georgia’s death penal­ty cas­es:

DISPOSITION OF GEORGIA DEATH PENALTY CASES
July 1973 — July 2003

NUMBER OF CASES
DISPOSITION
18
Acquittal
3
Dismissed
328
Death Sentence
23
Lesser Included Offense
222
Life Sentence with the Possibility of Parole
145
Life Sentence with­out the Possibility of Parole (LWOP)
1
Dead Docket
95
Pending Cases
835
GRAND TOTAL
Note: These fig­ures are with respect to ini­tial tri­als and do NOT reflect changes in dis­po­si­tions result­ing from retri­als.

Data for this project was col­lect­ed by the Multi-County Public Defender Office, which was cre­at­ed in 1992 by the Georgia General Assembly and the Georgia Supreme Court. The Multi-County Public Defender Office became the Office of the Georgia Capital Defender on January 1, 2005. (M. Mears, ​“Thirty Years Analysis of Death Penalty Cases in Georgia,” (2005)). See Resources and Sentencing.

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