By Kapish Kalita
ATLANTA, GA -The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) and the ACLU of Georgia said they have settled a lawsuit at the end of June on behalf of Barred Business against the Fulton County District Attorney’s Office for its “failure to comply with a court rule requiring the office to notify the Fulton County Superior Court Chief Judge of all unindicted individuals detained on felony charges for 45 days.”
The ACLU of Georgia added the “lawsuit… builds off a 2023 report from the ACLU of Georgia, which examined the ongoing overcrowding crisis at Fulton County Jail,” with the report finding that a “major driver of overcrowding was the significant number of people held without indictment” with “1,114 individuals, or 37 percent of the total Fulton County Jail population detained while unindicted.”
According to the ACLU of Georgia, “The Office’s compliance with its reporting requirement will provide the Chief Judge with notice of the Fulton County Jail’s pre-indictment population,” with this information, and help “facilitate more timely case processing and shorter pretrial detention,” reducing “dangerous overcrowding in the Fulton County Jail.”
According to Ural Glanville, chief judge of the Atlanta Judicial court, the State would assist the facilitation of processing by providing via email “a list of names of those criminally accused with a felony charge in custody in the Fulton County jail for over forty (40) days” with the list highlighting the names of “any person who reaches 45 days in custody unindicted between Friday and the subsequent Friday.”
In a statement about the lawsuit Andrés López-Delgado, staff attorney at the ACLU of Georgia, said, “No one should have to sit behind bars for days, weeks, or months without even being formally charged with a crime—yet that is a regular occurrence in the Fulton County Jail,” calling the settlement a “much-needed step in the right direction to bring transparency and accountability to the ongoing pretrial detention crisis in Fulton County.”
Barred Business, an Atlanta-based non-profit focused on incarceration, called the “settlement as a crucial victory” that “ensured the timely processing of cases…not just a legal obligation but a moral imperative that impacts the lives of countless individuals unjustly held without indictments.”
Barred Business added that “this agreement marks a significant step towards transparency, accountability, and ultimately, the reduction of overcrowding in Fulton County Jail.” Also, “Although a lawsuit should not have been necessary to force the Fulton County District Attorney’s Office to comply with its mandatory public duty, this settlement is one step, hopefully of many, to hold Fulton County officials to account for the persistent overcrowding at the Fulton County Jail.”
