Rights advocates call for repeal of Georgia citizen’s arrest law

Capitol Beat News Service

Georgia’s citizen’s arrest law has a history of racism and encourages civilians lacking law enforcement training to take the law into their own hands, civil- and human-rights advocates said Monday.

“Law enforcement has resources to handle these kinds of things,” Christopher Bruce, political director for the Georgia chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union, told members of a legislative committee. “We should encourage citizens to look to law enforcement.”

The Georgia House Judiciary

Non-Civil Committee took the first step with Monday’s hearing toward fulfilling House Speaker David Ralston’s pledge to follow up on the General Assembly’s recent passage of a hate-crimes law by considering additional criminal justice reforms.

The state’s citizen’s arrest law became a focus of attention following the fatal shooting earlier this year of Ahmaud Arbery, a 25-year-old black man gunned down while jogging near Brunswick. Two white men, a father and son, charged with murder in the case have claimed they were trying to make a citizen’s arrest because they suspected Arbery had committed a burglary.

The law was put on the books in Georgia during the Civil War, a time when white slaveholders were trying to prevent runaway slaves from joining the Union Army, said the Rev. James Woodall, president of the NAACP’s Georgia chapter.

“This law was literally written to keep Negroes as slaves,” he said.

After the war, vigilante mobs used the law to justify the lynching of blacks, Woodall said.

Both the ACLU and NAACP are recommending that the General Assembly repeal citizen’s arrest as an outdated law that is no longer necessary in an era when law enforcement agencies have sufficient resources to handle criminal complaints.

But some of the committee’s Republican members questioned whether doing away with the citizen’s arrest law would leave Georgians unprotected from home invasions or shopkeepers with no recourse to detain shoplifters.

Rep. Bert Reeves, R-Marietta, said a police officer can’t always be present.

“Can I detain somebody not authorized to be in my home or car?” he asked.

Marissa McCall Dodson, public policy director for the Southern Center for Human Rights, said the citizen’s arrest law could be repealed while maintaining the ability of shopkeepers to detain shoplifting suspects. Homeowners would still be protected by the legal right to self-defense, she said.

“Citizen’s arrest and selfdefense are not the same,” she said.

Gwinnett County District Attorney Danny Porter, who also testified Monday, said the cases of citizen’s arrests he has encountered in his decades as a prosecutor typically don’t go well because civilians attempting to make citizen’s arrests lack legal training.

“I’m personally not in favor of citizens arresting one another,” Porter said. “They usually turn out badly with someone’s misinterpretation of the law.”

However, Porter urged lawmakers to consider the potential consequences of abolishing homeowners’ ability to make a citizen’s arrest during a home invasion, leaving them with only the legal protection of self-defense.

“You incentivize a homeowner to kill someone rather than detain them under the citizen’s arrest law,” he said.