Although Georgia car­ried out 5 of the 28 exe­cu­tions in the U.S. in 2015, it imposed no new death sen­tences and a sig­nif­i­cant­ly changed legal land­scape points to a ​“new Georgia” with the death penal­ty in decline. The Georgia legal pub­li­ca­tion, Daily Report, dubbed the decline in death sen­tences its ​“news­mak­er of the year,” and explored the rea­sons for the change. 

Jerry Word, the divi­sion direc­tor of the Georgia Capital Defender, said that with the Defender’s ear­ly inter­ven­tion ini­tia­tive reach­ing out to pros­e­cu­tors to present rea­sons to decap­i­tal­ize a case, pros­e­cu­tors agreed to drop the death penal­ty in all 29 of the cas­es his office han­dled this year. The only cap­i­tal case that went to tri­al with the death penal­ty as an option was a case in which the defen­dant rep­re­sent­ed him­self, and the jury hand­ed down life with­out parole. In 2014, only one of the state’s 19 poten­tial cap­i­tal cas­es end­ed in a death sen­tence and only one of the last 71 cap­i­tal cas­es the cap­i­tal defend­er has han­dled has result­ed in a death verdict. 

Several fac­tors have cre­at­ed the new land­scape and con­tributed to the reduc­tion in death sen­tences. Word said these include the cost of death penal­ty tri­als and the efforts by defense coun­sel to present pros­e­cu­tors with mit­i­gat­ing evi­dence ear­ly in the process. But, he said, ​“I think the LWOP [life with­out parole] is the real­ly big one. We’ve had that for six years now, but we’ve real­ly just start­ed see­ing the impact in the last few years.” 

Chuck Spahos, exec­u­tive direc­tor of the Prosecuting Attorneys’ Council of Georgia, agreed that life with­out parole had played a sig­nif­i­cant role: ​“I cer­tain­ly think things changed dra­mat­i­cal­ly when the Legislature gave us the life with­out parole option,” he said. Similar fac­tors have con­tributed to death penal­ty declines in his­tor­i­cal­ly active death penal­ty states like Texas and Virginia. 

Sara Totonchi, exec­u­tive direc­tor of the Atlanta-based Southern Center for Human Rights, said ​“Georgia is in step with the nation­al trend of declin­ing use of the death penal­ty. The con­tin­ued mar­gin­al­iza­tion of the death penal­ty is not sur­pris­ing giv­en grow­ing con­cerns about its imple­men­ta­tion, par­tic­u­lar­ly with regard to the poten­tial of an inno­cent per­son being exe­cut­ed and the preva­lence of botched exe­cu­tions as states exper­i­ment with lethal injection drugs.”

(G. Land, “ ​‘Life Without Parole’ Leads to Shrinking Death Penalty Pipeline,” Daily Report, December 16, 2015.) See Sentencing and Life with­out Parole.

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