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Ga Supreme Court on GWL denials

I thought this would be nullified by "innocent until proven guilty" :confused:.

You are probably thinking about the old United States.

In case you didn't get the memo: Most of us are now guilty until proven innocent. And the best part? You can tell just by looking at us!
 
This is the same Bedelia Hargrove who was not elected to her office. She was an associate judge appointed by her predecessor who ran for office, was elected then two days later put in her retirement and effectively gave Hargrove the position without any special election. There was never an associate Probate Judge in DeKalb County before this. Sounds pretty fishy to me.
 
You are probably thinking about the old United States.

In case you didn't get the memo: Most of us are now guilty until proven innocent. And the best part? You can tell just by looking at us!
Ahhh, me, - the eternal optimist :doh:. But, as one of my old school mates used to say "nil bastardo carborundum".
 
Why did he not go find the records and submit them to the court after the denial ?
I'd bet the only paperwork available is the 'arresting officers report'. If the city/county attorney never filed any charges, there won't be any other 'records to submit', to the court.

Remember this happened in 1986
 
OP: I thought GA was a "shall issue" state unless there was indeed something that disqualifies you?
This happened in Dekalb County, which has a long history of impeding CWPs with bureaucratic nonsense as well as defying the state on many levels. When I had my own business I refused to do work in Dekalb County as they required contractors to register with the county and pay a fee. The state had forbidden this process but there was no punishment in the new laws, much the same as interfering with CWPs.
 
What if there are no such records?
Remember, he was not "charged."
No accusation, no indictment.
No "case" that was ever on the docket of any court.
The Solicitor's office probably never even opened a file.
The matter started and ended with just cops' involvement.
40 years ago was pre=computers. yes, just like dinosaurs, it was an age that had come and gone.

All of those records were recorded by hand. The town/county/court where all this occurred was not mentioned, but the arrest would have been recorded by hand in some sheriff's office or local PD, then the physical NCR copy of the citation would have been carried to the clerk's office, where it would have been recorded by hand in a docket book. Being a low grade misdemeanor, probably no physical file was created. It would have sat there as a bare docket entry until the end of time, eventually winding up on what is colloquially called the "dead docket". The actual citation was probably bundled up with all the other citations from that week and tossed into a file drawer.

So the book with written record sat there until some one decided to clean up, and it was thrown out, and some one cleaned out that file drawer with the bundles of citations. The statute of limitations on a misdemeanor would have expired like 35 years ago (I think) and any unrprosecuted cases were of no interest to the system.

NCIS has spoiled a lot of people about how the criminal justice works

The burden that the probate judge and Court of Appeals has placed on the applicant is to prove a negative, which as any student of rhetoric knows, you can't do. Have you quit beating your wife yet? No problem, you will just have your wife testify that you have never beat her -- BUT WAIT - she is not legally competent to testify against OR FOR you, and so there is no evidence that you have never beat her.

To give a little flavor of what record keeping was like in the time period under discussion. the probate judge in one SE Georgia county was a functional illiterate. He could not read the wills filed in his office. The population in the whole county was about 3000, so there were not that many people dying testate each year.

One of his "official" duties was each December to take all the wills that had been filed that year, and any proceedings, put them together and wrap them up with a rubber band and throw them into a banker's box, together will all the bundles for prior years. No docket or record of filing was ever created.

if you wanted to research an estate, you have to dig through the bundles in the banker's box, find that year, and dig through the bundle to find the estate. IF you were not certain of the year the person died, you had to start at the last year your knew they were alive and dig through all the bundles from that year forward. The closest thing to a "docket: was the probate judge's memory of about when someone died. OTOH it was not uncommon in rural areas with large tracts of land for wills to be filed years after someone's actual death.

In later years there were several cases where property had been divided up according to the laws of intestate succession, and someone digging through the banker's box found a will. When that happened, it was good times for all the local lawyers.
 
Judge Hargrove:

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