Federal judge questions Georgia’s parole system, lets woman’s lawsuit proceed

“A state may not evade Eighth Amendment scrutiny simply by labeling a sentence ‘life with parole’ when, in substance, it is a life-without-parole sentence,” Totenberg wrote.

As a teenager, Buttrum joined her husband in the murder of a young woman at a North Georgia motel.

Buttrum and her husband were convicted after separate trials. She was sentenced to the death penalty in 1981. That sentence was later overturned.

In 2017, a superior court judge resentenced Buttrum to life with the possibility of parole. This followed a pair of U.S. Supreme Court rulings that young people cannot be condemned to die in prison, except in rare cases where they are found to be irreparably corrupt.

Yet since becoming eligible for parole nearly a decade ago, Buttrum has been denied release again and again, receiving nearly identical form letters from the parole board citing the seriousness of her crime and the amount of time served. She has been in prison for more than four decades.

Buttrum’s case is one of two federal lawsuits challenging the state parole board, claiming that its parole process — specifically with regards to people sentenced to life with parole for crimes committed as teenagers — violates the Constitution and seminal U.S. Supreme Court rulings.

“We are grateful for the court’s careful consideration of these important issues,” said Ronan Doherty, an attorney with Bondurant, Mixson & Elmore, who is representing Buttrum.

“After more than 45 years in prison for a crime she committed as a child, we are grateful that Ms. Buttrum will have an opportunity to pursue the constitution’s promise of a genuine opportunity to gain release on parole,” he said.

Steve Hayes, a board spokesman, declined to comment on the case and referred the AJC to the state attorney general’s office.

A spokesperson for the attorney general, who is representing the parole board, declined to comment citing pending litigation.

‘Life with parole’ — in theory

The question before the court is not whether Buttrum should be released, but whether Georgia’s parole system gives people like her a real chance at release at all.

In the lawsuit Doherty argued that by basing its parole denial on the original crime with no consideration of changes in the person convicted or their youth at the time of the crime, the board is essentially issuing sentences of de facto life without parole. This is a violation, according to the suit, of the Eighth Amendment, which prohibits cruel and usual punishment.

At this early stage of the case, the judge agreed Doherty’s allegations were plausible.

“If a life-sentenced juvenile offender like Plaintiff has no real chance—however remote—of actually obtaining release on parole, because her parole proceedings are a sham and it is a foregone conclusion that the Board will deny parole, she is effectively serving a sentence of life-without-parole,” wrote Totenberg.

In describing why the claim could proceed, Judge Totenberg pointed to Buttrum’s own parole history — five denials since 2017 — and to broader evidence suggesting that people serving life with parole sentences for crimes committed as minors are rarely released in Georgia.

Totenberg specifically cited a 2023 Atlanta Journal-Constitution investigation finding that not a single person resentenced under a landmark Supreme Court ruling limiting life-without-parole sentences for juveniles had been released from Georgia prisons six years after the decision was made retroactive in 2017.

Eleven people had been resentenced. Nine had gone before the parole board. None had come home.

The judge contrasted that with Florida, where the Eleventh Circuit upheld the parole system in part because juvenile lifers were actually being released; about 1% per year. Georgia’s total absence of releases, she wrote, supports the inference that parole consideration in the state may be procedural in name only.

“This allegation creates a plausible inference that the Board does not afford genuine parole consideration to juvenile offenders serving life sentences,” Totenberg wrote, noting that the data point mattered to the court because it distinguished the Georgia parole board’s practices from other states.

A crime at 17, and decades of waiting

The details of Buttrum’s case are not easy.

According to the suit, Buttrum married her husband, Danny Buttrum, when she was 15-years old. He was 26, divorced and had a history of substance abuse issues. Prior to meeting him she was in and out of the foster system, where she suffered sexual abuse.

In 1981, when Janice Buttrum was 17, the couple made headlines when they were convicted of brutally killing a 19-year-old woman in a north Georgia motel. The victim was raped and sodomized and stabbed 97 times with a pocketknife.

Janice Buttrum was sentenced to the death penalty. Danny Buttrum also was sentenced to the death penalty, but hanged himself while in custody in 1981, three days after his wife was sentenced.

Over the last four decades, her sentence has changed to reflect the high court’s rulings. The court said young people who commit crimes shouldn’t die at the hands of the state. They deserve a second look. And a look different from adults.

In 1991, following a federal habeas review, she was resentenced to life without parole. Then, in 2017 — following Supreme Court decisions holding that only juveniles found to be “irreparably corrupt” could be sentenced to die in prison, and the decision needed to be retroactive — she was resentenced again, this time to life with the possibility of parole.

On paper, it was a chance at freedom. Her lawyers, however, argue it has been no such thing.

“It’s a murder case, it’s a former death penalty case, so, sure, it’s going to be challenging. You’re going to have to grapple with the facts of the crime. But she was a child. She’s done, at this point, well over 40 years in prison, her health is not great,” Mark Loudon-Brown, an attorney with the Southern Center for Human Rights, a nonprofit public interest law firm, who has represented Buttrum in the appellate process, told the AJC last spring.

He described the transformation his client had undergone over more than four decades. The 63-year-old great-grandmother completed thousands of hours of job training, earned a high school equivalency certificate and college credits, and secured a spot in the Honor Dorm at Pulaski State Prison. Her last disciplinary infraction was in 1999.

Credit: Billy Downs

Credit: Billy Downs

Under Georgia law, the parole board must follow established guidelines — weighing crime severity and risk of reoffending — for people serving less than a life sentence. For those serving life with the possibility of parole, no such guidelines exist. There are no required criteria, no mandated considerations, no rules compelling the board to weigh rehabilitation or maturity.

This matters because the Supreme Court has held that people who committed crimes as children must be considered differently than adults. Their capacity for change, not just the nature of their offense, is supposed to be part of the calculus.

When Buttrum’s lawyers asked the parole board to produce documents describing how it evaluates maturity and rehabilitation for people who committed crimes as children, or how it distinguishes between adult and juvenile offenders, the board said it had none.

Totenberg found that troubling, writing that a system permitting the board to act with “zero accountability” could easily become a mechanism for automatic denial regardless of how much a person had changed.

What was dismissed, what survives

The ruling was not a complete victory for Buttrum.

Totenberg dismissed a due process claim and a related argument that juvenile offenders are entitled to a meaningful opportunity for release; both blocked by a recent appeals court ruling that is itself now under challenge. If that ruling is reversed, both claims could be revived.

What survived is narrower but significant: The claim that Georgia’s parole system, as applied to people serving life sentences for crimes they committed as minors, is a constitutional violation under the Eighth Amendment’s prohibition on cruel and unusual punishment.

The case will now move into discovery, where Buttrum’s lawyers can seek records and testimony about how the board actually makes decisions for people serving life sentences from crimes they committed in their youth. A process that the board has long kept shrouded, claiming “confidential state secrets” when attorneys and journalists have asked for such documents.

For Buttrum, now using a walker and in declining health, the new ruling does not mean freedom. It means, for the first time, a court will examine whether the promise made to her in 2017 was ever intended to be kept.