It’s Sine Die!

Today marks the last day of the 2025 session. While we are excited about several important bills that have passed, our priority today is to oppose five Senate bills in the House and one House bill in the Senate.

We are also prepared to speak against a bill that might be taken up by the House Judiciary Non-Civil Committee. If that bill—SB 61—advances from the committee without amendments that address our concerns, we will need your help defeating it in the House.

Below are the the bills we need your help defeating before the session ends tonight! As always, you can follow the bills we are tracking by subscribing to our Bill Tracker.

Contact your Georgia House Representative and urge them to VOTE NO on SB 12, SB 27, SB 29, SB 204 and SB 268!

• SB 12 – During an evening meeting on April 2, the House Rules Committee passed a substitute version of SB 12, adding language to limit the public’s right to know what its police and its lawmakers are doing. Georgia’s Open Records Act, like most states’ public records laws, already includes some exemptions for sensitive law enforcement records concerning active investigations. Also like most states, Georgia does not exempt basic information concerning stops and arrests because it is crucial for a free society to understand the activity of armed agents of the state. The current version of SB 12 changes the exemption for law enforcement records such that police departments could shield nearly all information about their stops and arrests.
• SB 27 would make, electronically posting someone’s personally identifiable information, including their name or where they work, “with reckless disregard as to whether” the information could be used by another party to cause the identified person (or their associates) to be fearful of physical harm (including stalking, injury, or death), significant economic injury, or mental anguish. Simply put, the criminal law proposed by SB 27 is unconstitutionally over-broad. The risk of arrest and prosecution would chill free speech, and that’s why SB 27—like any overly broad law that prohibits unprotected speech and a substantial amount of protected speech—is a serious constitutional violation.
• SB 29 would require law enforcement to collect the DNA of every adult arrested for a serious violent felony for a statewide database. Under current law, only people convicted of a felony have their DNA collected and sent to GBI’s Division of Forensic Sciences for analysis and entry into the database. SB 29 undermines the presumption of innocence by collapsing distinctions between pre- and post-conviction. It establishes a system of suspicionless and warrantless searches of people’s genetic data.
• SB 204 would drastically expand the scope of felonies that can be charged by accusation of the district attorney rather than indictment by a grand jury. Grand juries do not always decide to indict someone the prosecution seeks to charge. For that reason, grand juries are an important check on the state’s power that protects people from prosecution without probable cause.
• SB 268 would place anyone within 25 feet of an officer who gives them a “verbal warning not to approach” at risks of arrest for the offense of “interference with a first responder.” The offense would require that the person breaching the 25-foot “buffer zone” to have criminal intent, such as intent to “impede or interfere with the first responder’s ability to perform [their] duty.” Flimsy intent elements like this are typical in minor offenses that have been weaponized against over-policed communities. This law would be used to intimidate and retaliate against people attempting to hold police accountable or merely expressing concern for a friend or loved one’s safety. In prior committee hearings, the bill’s author has explicitly named people filming first responders to share online as something the bill is intended to address.

Contact your Georgia Senator and urge them to VOTE NO on HB 171!

HB 171 was amended by the Senate Rules Committee to reverse all improvements made to the bill by the Senate Judiciary Committee. In its current version, distributing, soliciting, or even possessing an AI-generated depiction of someone who appears to be a child “engaging in sexually explicit behavior” is a felony punishable by 1-15 years of imprisonment. HB 171 also would create sentencing enhancements that would increase the mandatory minimums for anyone who uses AI during the commission of an offense. There are two major problems with the bill.

• The existing law that criminalizes the same conduct for images or video of actual children is punishable by 1-20 years, but it includes an exception for children in possession of sexually explicit images of themselves or of another minor. HB 171 provides no such exception for kids. A bill supposedly about protecting kids shouldn’t include sending teenagers to prison for doing teenage things.
• Sentencing enhancements exacerbate mass incarceration and don’t make us safer. And frankly, even if that weren’t so, we cannot understand why fraud or theft with the assistance of AI deserves a harsher punishment than fraud or theft without the use of AI.

Stand by to contact your Representative to urge them to VOTE NO on SB 61 if necessary!

The House Judiciary Non-Civil Committee is meeting today to consider a substitute for SB 61 that would include the same language as HB 171! If it passes out of committee, please contact your State Representative to urge them to vote no on SB 61.

• If waiting around isn’t your style, contact members of the House Judiciary Non-Civil Committee to urge them to amend SB 61 to:
  • make distribution of AI-generated obscene material depicting a child a misdemeanor (instead of a felony) under limited circumstances when the defendant themself is a child; and
  • remove the section creating new sentencing enhancements.