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The Georgia Supreme Court should re-evaluate dozens of potentially flawed death sentences that it had justified by relying on overturned decisions, defense lawyers said Wednesday.

Such an inquiry might mean reopening about 100 decisions in which the court has affirmed death sentences from across Georgia. There are 105 inmates on Georgia's death row, according to the state Department of Corrections.

"There's nothing that would prevent the court from recalling cases and performing a real review," said George Kendall, a New York attorney who defends capital cases across the South. "The review is a critical part of Georgia's law."

But Rick Malone, executive director of the Georgia Prosecuting Attorneys' Council, defended the court's use of overturned cases. "Doing it in any other way ... they would have to circumvent the decision of the people of Georgia," he said in an interview. "I don't think they're prepared to do that."

The Atlanta Journal-Constitution reported Wednesday that about 80 percent of the Supreme Court's "proportionality reviews" of death sentences since 1982 have cited overturned cases. Nineteen percent of the cases cited by the court had already been set aside on appeal, and almost as many more were overturned after the court's review.

In more than a third of the reviews, at least 25 percent of the cited sentences had been thrown out.

Nearly all of the murderers whose sentences were overturned were resentenced to life in prison rather than death. Murder charges against several of the defendants were dropped altogether, and another was found not guilty at retrial.

Under Georgia's death penalty statute, the Supreme Court is supposed to throw out sentences that are disproportionately severe when compared to punishment in similar cases. The court typically cites a dozen or more comparable death sentences to justify the sentence it is reviewing.

Chief Justice Leah Ward Sears could not be reached for comment Wednesday. In a recent statement, Sears said the court is taking steps to improve its proportionality review and is taking "a very long, hard look" at its use of overturned cases.

Sears said the court's primary task is to assess whether a crime is heinous enough to warrant a death sentence. When the court cites older cases, it focuses on how earlier juries in similar cases reacted to evidence.

The Journal-Constitution found that while some cases were overturned because of procedural errors, others had serious problems regarding ineffective defense attorneys, prosecutorial misconduct, inadequate jury instructions and evidence that jurors should not have considered.

Malone, a former district attorney in Middle Georgia, said the court's job is to look at whether a jury makes a "reasonable decision" to impose a death sentence. Cases can still be proportional even if they were overturned before the court referenced them, he said.

But Atlanta defense attorney Don Samuel said the newspaper's findings show the high court has not been performing its job and needs to make a change.

"It is not too late," he said. "Now is the time for the court to do what it is required to do for each and every person who has been condemned."

Thirty of the 159 rulings examined by the Journal-Constitution did not cite a previously overturned case. But Samuel said that does not mean they did not have problems, too.

"Even if there are cases that seem to have no problems, they are likely based on others that were flawed," Samuel said. "Their foundation is equally corrupt."

Leigh Bienen, a law professor from Northwestern University in Chicago and an expert on proportionality reviews nationwide, noted that Georgia's review became the model for other states after the U.S. Supreme Court reinstated capital punishment in 1976.

"It is a grim irony that the Georgia proportionality review ... has turned into a process which is at best perfunctory and at worst dismissive and rife with legal error," Bienen said.