Deaths in Custody
Georgia

At least 5,397 people have died in custody in Georgia

1,428 of them are named here. The rest appear only in the state’s official counts, without names.

At least 75 people have died in custody in Georgia so far in 2026. The most recent named here is Martin Floyd, who died on October 6, 2026 at Cobb County Adult Detention Center.

Each dot is one of them, held in a jail, prison or lockup, or executed by the state. Some died after abuse by officers; others from withdrawal, overdose or untreated illness; many by suicide. Almost all of them show the state’s neglect of the people in its custody.

This is an undercount: many deaths are never made public, and older records are hard to find.

Records go back as far as 1861 and are current as of October 16, 2026

Their stories

Choose a dot on the map, or a kind of place below, to read about the people who died there.

Their names

When they died

One mark per person, by the year they died. Choose the box at the side to see every decade. Coverage is uneven: recent deaths come mostly from local news since 2000, older ones from official lists and historical newspapers, so the shape shows what was recorded as much as how many people died.

What these deaths have cost taxpayers

These deaths have cost taxpayers in Georgia at least $22 million: the amount governments have agreed or been ordered to pay the families and estates of at least 9 people named here, in settlements and court awards reported in the news. Families sued over at least 44 of these deaths. Many suits end with no amount made public, and many settlements are kept confidential, so the true cost is higher.

PersonPaid byYearAmount
Thomas Henry GilesState of Georgia$5 million
Lashawn ThompsonFulton County2023$4 million
David HenegarState of Georgia2026$4 million
Juan Carlos RamirezState of Georgia$3.2 million
Jenna MitchellGeorgia Department of Corrections2021$2.2 million
Name not reportedState of Georgia$1.5 million
Rodney Earl GrahamDouglas County$937,500
Lee Michael CreelyChatham County2025$500,000
James McBrayerTift County$500,000

What official counts show

The Georgia Department of Corrections reports how many people die in its prisons each year, but not who they were. Most of those deaths, especially from illness, never appear in the news, so far fewer are named here. The gap is people still to be identified.

The department publishes no report of deaths. These counts come from its yearly tally of people released from custody, where dying is release type 62.1 It stopped announcing deaths in press releases after June 2022,2 and in 2024 its monthly mortality reports, which reporters obtain by request, stopped saying how people died.3 The U.S. Department of Justice found in 2024 that the department's mortality data listed many deaths that were clearly homicides as unknown or undetermined, sometimes for years.4

YearDeaths in state custody, as reported by GDCNamed here
202530119
202433329
202325717
202225226
202125917
202029215
201917615
201819613
20171906
20161517
20151501

Source: The Georgia Department of Corrections yearly Profile of Inmate Releases, which counts deaths as a type of release. Official counts are deaths in state prisons only; county jails report to no central agency.

Where these records come from

Each bar is a source and the years its records cover. Sources checked on a schedule are searched again for new records; the others were collected once.

  1. Historical newspapers1842–1963 · Searched once · Library of Congress digitized newspapers, searched for people taken from jails and officers and killed
    1842 to 1963
  2. Georgia Department of Corrections, History of Executions in Georgia1924–today · Checked every three months · Records for this state: 1924–2024
    1924 to today
  3. Local news2000–today · Searched again every night · News coverage searched county by county and year by year
    2000 to today
  4. Official yearly counts (BJS)2001–2019 · Checked every month · Totals only; the agency does not publish names
    2001 to 2019
  5. U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, Detainee Death Reporting and List of Deaths in ICE Custody2003–today · Checked every week · Records for this state: 2005–2026
    2003 to today
  6. Official yearly counts (GDC)2015–2025 · Checked every month · Totals only; the agency does not publish names
    2015 to 2025

How deaths in custody are reported in Georgia

In state prisons, a state rule tells the warden to notify the Commissioner of Corrections, the county coroner or medical examiner, the State Crime Laboratory, the Director of the Georgia Bureau of Investigation (GBI) and the next of kin after a sudden or violent death. The state's own plan for federal reporting says this is the only death-in-custody reporting Georgia law sets out, and that it covers only facilities under the State Board of Corrections.5 The GBI performs autopsies in prison deaths but does not usually investigate them; the department's own investigators do.6

County jails and city lockups report to no state agency. Under the Georgia Death Investigation Act, the death of anyone held in a state, county or city penal institution must be reported to the county coroner or medical examiner,7 but no state law requires the state's roughly 800 law enforcement and corrections agencies to report custody deaths to any central office.5 The GBI looks into a jail death only when the local sheriff asks, and Georgia is one of 17 states with no system of oversight for local jails.8

For the federal Death in Custody Reporting Act, the Criminal Justice Coordinating Council (CJCC) gathers records itself. Since 2019 it has collected them monthly from the Department of Corrections, quarterly from the GBI, the Department of Juvenile Justice and four metro Atlanta medical examiners, and monthly from state death certificates, then sent them to the U.S. Bureau of Justice Assistance. By the council's own account, staff turnover delayed reporting from almost every agency, and the Gwinnett County Medical Examiner had stopped reporting.5 Nationally, a 2022 U.S. Senate investigation found that the Justice Department missed at least 990 prison and arrest-related deaths in fiscal year 2021.9

Deaths in immigration detention are counted by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, not the state. Congress requires ICE to publish a report on each death within 90 days.10 Stewart Detention Center in Lumpkin recorded its 13th death since 2006 in June 2025, and of 15 deaths in ICE custody nationwide in 2025 through September, ICE posted public notice within two days for only six.11 The Folkston ICE Processing Center, owned by The GEO Group, was set in 2025 to more than double its capacity.12

What has changed

  1. 1868–1908Georgia leased people from its prisons to private companies, starting with a railroad on May 11, 1868. Sixteen people died in the first year. The legislature outlawed convict leasing in 1908.13
  2. 1905On June 29, a mob broke into the Oconee County jail in Watkinsville, took eight men from custody and shot them to death; no one was ever charged. Historians count 458 lynching victims in Georgia from 1882 to 1930.14
  3. 2001The Georgia Supreme Court ruled the electric chair unconstitutional, and the state turned to lethal injection. Georgia executed at least 950 people before 1976, and at least 77 since.15
  4. 2019The Criminal Justice Coordinating Council began collecting death-in-custody records for federal reporting, without any state law requiring agencies to send them.5
  5. January 2021After Reuters documented 272 deaths in Georgia's 13 largest jails from 2008 to 2019, state legislators held a hearing and proposed requiring the GBI to examine every jail death.8
  6. May 2021The Department of Homeland Security ordered ICE to stop using the Irwin County Detention Center in Ocilla.16 ICE reopened it in 2025.17
  7. September 2021The U.S. Department of Justice expanded its investigation of Georgia's state prisons. The department refused to hand over most records until mid-2023, after a court enforced a subpoena.4
  8. June 2022The Department of Corrections issued its last press release announcing a death in a state prison.2
  9. 2024The department's monthly mortality reports stopped giving its assessment of how each person died, leaving that to death certificates that can take months.3 In August the commissioner told legislators that 981 people had died in state prisons since 2021, 98 of them of unknown causes.18
  10. October 2024The Justice Department found that conditions in Georgia's prisons violate the Eighth Amendment, and that the state's mortality data undercount homicides.4
  11. November 2024The Justice Department found unconstitutional conditions at the Fulton County Jail,19 where it had opened an investigation in July 2023. A proposed consent decree with an independent monitor followed in January 2025.20
  12. December 2024A legislative study committee on prison deaths declined to recommend that the GBI investigate them, and rejected a proposal for an independent oversight committee.6

How far the official numbers can be trusted

The Department of Corrections reported 142 homicides in its prisons from 2018 through 2023, after never more than nine a year from 2011 through 2018. The Justice Department found even these totals too low. The mortality data listed deaths the department's own incident reports called homicides as "unknown" until a death certificate arrived. For January to May 2024 it showed 6 homicides when incident reports showed at least 18, and seven deaths from 2022 were recorded as undetermined or natural until 2024.4

Independent counts run higher. The Atlanta Journal-Constitution counted 38 homicides in state prisons in 2023,3 three more than the department reported.4 The department told the newspaper it investigated 66 deaths as homicides in 2024 and 42 more in the first six months of 2025.21

The yearly totals do not match the department's own lists of names. For 2015 it reported 150 deaths as releases,22 while its mortality list for that year, obtained by the UCLA Law Behind Bars Data Project, names 143 people.23 For county jails there is no state count to check; Reuters found 272 deaths in Georgia's 13 largest jails from 2008 to 2019 by gathering records itself.8

Notes

  1. Georgia Department of Corrections, "Profile of Inmate Releases, Calendar Year 2024." ↩
  2. Georgia Department of Corrections, "Inmate Death Being Investigated as Apparent Suicide," June 26, 2022. ↩
  3. The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, "Georgia state prison deaths hit record number for first half of 2024," August 15, 2024. ↩
  4. U.S. Department of Justice, Civil Rights Division, "Investigation of Georgia Prisons," October 1, 2024. ↩
  5. Criminal Justice Coordinating Council, "Death in Custody Reporting Act (DCRA) State Implementation Plan, FY 2023." ↩
  6. Associated Press (via WRDW), "Ga. senators want money, staffing to address prison deaths," December 18, 2024. ↩
  7. Georgia Bureau of Investigation, Division of Forensic Sciences, "ME FAQ" (O.C.G.A. § 45-16-24). ↩
  8. Reuters (via WHBL), Ned Parker, "Georgia legislators, citing Reuters report, want every jail death investigated," January 25, 2021. ↩
  9. U.S. Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, "Uncounted Deaths in America's Prisons & Jails," staff report, September 20, 2022. ↩
  10. U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, "Detainee Death Reporting." ↩
  11. Sen. Raphael Warnock, "Warnock, Ossoff Press Trump Administration Over Deaths in ICE Custody," September 23, 2025. ↩
  12. Georgia Public Broadcasting, Grant Blankenship, "South Georgia ICE processing center doubles capacity in nationwide push," June 4, 2025. ↩
  13. New Georgia Encyclopedia, William Andrew Todd, "Convict Lease System." ↩
  14. New Georgia Encyclopedia, Stewart E. Tolnay and E. M. Beck, "Lynching." ↩
  15. Death Penalty Information Center, "Georgia." ↩
  16. U.S. Department of Homeland Security, "ICE to Close Two Detention Centers," May 20, 2021. ↩
  17. NPR (via WGCU), Meg Anderson, "ICE is reopening shuttered prisons as detention centers. Many have a troubled past," December 18, 2025. ↩
  18. Associated Press (via WTVC NewsChannel 9), "Georgia lawmakers seek answers to deaths, violence plaguing the state's prisons," August 28, 2024. ↩
  19. U.S. Department of Justice, "Fulton County Jail Investigation Findings" (summary), November 14, 2024. ↩
  20. Associated Press (via WTVC NewsChannel 9), Kate Brumback, "Justice Department enters consent decree with Fulton County over jail conditions," January 4, 2025. ↩
  21. The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, "Georgia prison homicides on the rise, already approaching last year's total," September 8, 2025. ↩
  22. Georgia Department of Corrections, "Profile of Inmate Releases, Calendar Year 2015." ↩
  23. UCLA Law Behind Bars Data Project, Georgia individual death records (from Georgia Department of Corrections records). ↩

The 1,428 Georgia records here draw on 1,097 news reports from 212 outlets, mostly local newspapers and TV stations. Each person’s reports are listed with their story, so every detail can be traced to where it was published.

How these records were made · See these records in a table

Last updated October 16, 2026.

Questions, a correction, or a death I’ve missed? Email me at orion.j.taylor@gmail.com.