A shoplifting arrest in September 2023 turned into a death sentence for Boycie Howard.
Howard missed an arraignment hearing, which led to a bench warrant, which led to his arrest when he was pulled over for speeding in February 2024. After being booked into jail, Howard—who suffered from bipolar disorder and schizophrenia, according to family members—had a breakdown and attacked a sheriff’s deputy. That resulted in four additional felony charges, including aggravated assault.
Bond was denied, and in April 2024 Howard’s public defender requested a mental health evaluation from the Georgia Department of Behavioral Health and Developmental Disabilities. Such evaluations can take months—at the end of last year, 769 inmates were languishing in Georgia jails awaiting one.
Last September, his lawyer filed a motion to have him declared mentally incompetent to stand trial, and Judge Lawton Stephens wrote a letter to DBHDD ordering the agency to send someone to the Clarke County Jail to evaluate Howard, instead of Howard waiting an “intolerably long” period of time for a bed to open up at the department’s Augusta facility. Ten months later, on July 8, Howard was found dead in his cell at age 36. He had spent 16 months behind bars without a trial—potentially longer than his sentence would have been, had he been convicted.
Howard was one of four inmates who died at the Clarke County Jail between April and July. A fifth died at a local hospital after falling ill at the jail. At a news conference last month, Sheriff John Q. Williams blamed at least two of the deaths, as well as two nonfatal overdoses, on fentanyl. Williams said arrestees were able to sneak it past guards because even tiny, virtually invisible amounts are enough to cause overdoses.
Howard’s father, Anthony Howard, questioned that narrative at a recent Athens Anti-Discrimination Movement town hall meeting on jail inmates’ rights at the ACC Library. His son, he said, was being kept apart from the general population because of his mental health problems.
“He was in the high max area,” Anthony Howard said. “He had no contact with inmates. He only had contact with the officers.”
As Howard noted, the Georgia Bureau of Investigation has yet to release the cause of Boycie’s death. “They can’t say how he died,” Anthony said.
Anthony Howard said he had been in and out of jail himself for most of his life, most recently in 2022. “They left us alone for days on lockdown with no officer,” due to a lack of staff, he said.
The staff shortage is something Williams has long acknowledged in demanding funding for deputy pay raises. The Athens-Clarke County Commission finally granted his request in June as part of the county’s fiscal 2026 budget.
The AADM’s Kendra Kline filed an open records request with the Clarke County Sheriff’s Office and combed through news media archives dating back to 2001, the start of Williams’ predecessor Ira Edwards’ 20-year tenure as sheriff. She found that at least 24 people had died while in custody, with an average age of 39. Usually a cause of death was not given, but if one was cited, it was most commonly “natural causes.”
The AADM announced a new program at the July 29 meeting called “participatory defense.” Created in Silicon Valley in 2007, “it was basically trying to bring a community organizing model to the criminal justice system,” Kline said.
The program is not a legal clinic; rather, it brings together people who’ve experienced the criminal justice system firsthand to help defendants and their lawyers. For example, participants could write a “social biography” designed to convince a judge or jury to show leniency, find holes in arrest reports or make a list of overzealous police officers. “We’re going to intervene every step of the way,” Kline said.
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