‘Beyond sad’: Georgia’s bad lawyering revealed in legislative study

Unable to afford a lawyer, Georgia inmate Dontravious Mahone was represented by a state-appointed attorney when appealing his convictions for murder and other charges in the death of a young Alpharetta man. It did not go well.

In upholding Mahone’s convictions and life sentence earlier this year, the Georgia Supreme Court admonished his lawyer for filing arguments on an irrelevant charge, failing to argue essential portions of the case and including garbled text in briefing, among other things. The court said the errors by the lawyer were “confounding and inexcusable,” adding it had twice warned him in 2025 about his inadequate representation of other defendants in two different murder appeals.

The situation is not unique, and it’s now being tackled by a legislative committee that conducted several hearings over the summer.

Multiple indigent defendants in Georgia have lost appeals in which their lawyers, appointed and paid by the state, have been criticized by judges for subpar work, according to recent published court opinions and associated filings.

In more than 30 public opinions and orders viewed by The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, judges have declared some criminal appeals abandoned for lack of proper argument and upheld convictions and sentences. They have sent some cases back to trial courts so defendants can either get new lawyers or choose to represent themselves. And they’ve alerted relevant authorities, including the State Bar of Georgia, to the problem.

In instances of repeated errors, judges have warned lawyers about being barred from practicing in the state’s appellate courts, filings show.

“It’s just been beyond sad to see,” said Atteeyah Hollie, deputy director of the Southern Center for Human Rights, which has advocated for improvements to Georgia’s indigent defense system for several decades. “What we are seeing right now is beyond the pale. And we can do better in our state. It’s a matter of whether we want to do better.”

State officials responsible for the representation of indigent defendants acknowledge there have been problems, like in many states, and say they’re increasing review of court filings and recruiting more staff as part of the solution. Overloaded public defenders are a problem nationwide, according to a 2023 study by the RAND Corporation, in collaboration with the National Center for State Courts and the American Bar Association.

J.M. Raffauf, the Roswell lawyer who represented Mahone, was also rebuked this year by the Georgia Court of Appeals for failing to properly represent indigent defendants in other criminal cases. He did not respond to multiple inquiries this month about his work.

Raffauf is one of dozens of Georgia lawyers who have been contracted by the state to represent indigent defendants in criminal appeals. Because legal representation is a constitutional right for those charged with a crime, the state steps in when a defendant can’t afford a lawyer.

The state agency responsible for providing lawyers to indigent defendants is the Georgia Public Defender Council, known as the GPDC. It currently has around 65 contract lawyers statewide that it pays $5,000 per appeal, sometimes more if a case is especially complex. Each contract attorney has 15 to 20 GPDC appeals on average.

Industry standards suggest around 25 criminal appeals at any one time is a full caseload for an attorney, depending on case complexity. The amount paid to public defenders for appeals varies state to state, with some paid by the hour and others a flat fee.

One of the GPDC’s few staff attorneys handling appeals recently quit, acknowledging she had done her clients a disservice, after the state’s top judges rejected her inadequate arguments in multiple criminal cases.

That lawyer, Marilyn Tyler, said in a July letter to the state Supreme Court that she struggled with her weighty caseload at the GPDC, where the number of staff attorneys handling appeals has dropped to four, down from 11 last year. A fully staffed appellate division of the council has 14 full-time attorneys.

Tyler and Raffauf are among more than half a dozen lawyers paid by the GPDC, either as staff or contractors, who have been reprimanded in published court opinions in 2025 and 2026 for filing inadequate appeal arguments. The AJC contacted those lawyers. Tyler didn’t respond to prior requests for comment. One of the other reprimanded lawyers responded, declining to comment.

Hollie told the AJC some of the filings didn’t have syntactically correct writing in them.

“You are seeing profound errors that you wouldn’t expect to see in a middle school student’s paper,” she said. “It’s embarrassing for those lawyers and I’m sure it’s embarrassing for the agency itself.”

Cynthia Harrison, in charge of the GPDC’s appellate division since April, told the AJC this week that the office’s policies and procedures have been revised. She said a system implemented in June requires contract attorneys to submit court documents for basic review before filing them, adding there is not enough “manpower” for substantial review of each brief.

“If a contract attorney is admonished by the appellate court, the attorney is removed from the list of attorneys eligible to receive cases moving forward,” Harrison said in a statement Monday. “I believe the attorneys that provide appellate representation are hardworking individuals who are committed to representing their clients to the best of their ability. The rebukes and admonishments are the exception.”

Both Raffauf and Tyler are active State Bar of Georgia members in good standing with no public discipline on record, according to its website.

Claims of an agency division ‘destroyed’

The issue has come to light in a legislative committee study aimed at improving Georgia’s post-conviction litigation system, which the state’s top judge says is a mess.

The Georgia House of Representatives study was prompted by Georgia Supreme Court Chief Justice Nels Peterson, who said at the committee’s first public meeting in July that “the status quo is not acceptable.”

Peterson and several criminal defense attorneys and law professors in Georgia have separately told committee members that one problem is the decline of the GPDC’s previously successful appellate division. They said the division hasn’t rebounded from when it was effectively gutted in June 2020, though state legislators agreed at the time to fund it. And they have directed blame at GPDC Executive Director Omotayo Alli, appointed in March 2020 by Gov. Brian Kemp.

“We’ve had a very good appellate division of GPDC and the current director of GPDC destroyed it,” Peterson said at the committee’s July 10 meeting. “There’s a lot of great public defenders out there who care about doing appeals and doing them well, and have done them, historically. They’re just not willing to work in this particular agency at this time.”

Alli declined an interview for this article. In written responses to the AJC’s questions, she said the division has continued to operate throughout her leadership, handling about 85% of criminal appeals in the state. She said it currently has about 1,150 open cases and was worse before her appointment. She cited communication, recordkeeping and oversight problems.

Alli, who wrote letters to the committee rather than attend its public meetings, said she is concerned about officials forming “adverse impressions based on incomplete or inaccurate information, particularly where it may affect the representation our clients receive.”

Bare-bones representation is the natural result of a system relying on attorneys willing to take a criminal appeal for $5,000 when the same work in private practice could be worth anywhere from $25,000 to $200,000, said Andrew Fleischman, a Georgia criminal defense attorney.

Fleischman was a staff attorney in the GPDC’s appellate division between 2015 and 2017 before moving into private practice. He told the AJC that $5,000 per appeal might seem inexpensive for the state, until you consider the costs of poor representation.

“When cases are being sent back down because the lawyer did such an inadequate job, or the briefing is so bad that you need to send it to a different lawyer to do, you’re not necessarily saving money,” he said.

Hollie said Georgia’s public defender system was formed in part to address issues with piecemeal representation and it’s “frankly shocking” that state officials are dealing with the problem some 20 years later. She said the GPDC’s appellate division is supposed to serve as “a crucial check on illegal policing and prosecutorial practices.”

“As long as we allow this system to continue the way it is, we’ll be condemning poor people and poor people only to the most unfair convictions and the longest prison sentences,” she said. “We have to have the same commitment to ensuring that people have good representation as we do to locking them up.”

Conflicting opinions in search for solutions

The committee is considering several possible solutions, including taking appeals off the GPDC’s plate and establishing a separate office to do that work.

Alli is opposed to the idea. In an Oct. 1 letter to the committee, she said appeals “should remain within the council, where the appellate infrastructure, the statewide reach, and the accountability already exist.”

Several Georgia attorneys and law professors have said in committee meetings that an independent appellate office could improve the quality of representation provided to indigent defendants.

Sarah Gerwig, who teaches criminal law and human rights classes at Mercer University School of Law, said the recent rebukes by appellate judges indicate a lack of oversight and minimum competency standards in the council’s appellate division. She said a separate, larger team of dedicated attorneys and support staff would reduce reliance on contract attorneys, who aren’t paid much considering the complex and time-consuming nature of the work.

GPDC Chief Legal Officer Natalie Glaser told committee members that contract attorneys earned much less per appeal before Alli took charge. She said the agency has a robust training program and resources available for contract attorneys, adding that Harrison has been reviewing those lawyers to “whittle that list down to who is being the most effective.”