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GJP Featured on 11Alive and Fox 5 Atlanta

Georgia Justice Project (GJP) made rounds in local news last week! Check out the stories below to learn more about the work on expungement issues that GJP is doing throughout Georgia.

11 Alive reporter and GJP volunteer attorney, Bill Liss, covered a story last week about GJP’s involvement in the Opportunity ATL Job Fair and expungement event hosted by the Metro Atlanta Chamber of Commerce. This was the first multi-county expungement event in Georgia. The event was the latest iteration of several expungement summits that GJP has helped plan across the state, where individuals can get eligible charges restricted from their criminal record at no cost with the goal of removing barriers to employment, housing, and other opportunities they may have experienced in the past.

Check out the 11Alive story here.

GJP’s Legal Director, Brenda Smeeton, also appeared on Fox 5 Atlanta last week to discuss the issue of criminal records as a result of field drug tests. These tests are notoriously inaccurate, often resulting in drug trafficking charges that are promptly dropped due to being a false positive. However, even when individuals are wrongly arrested due to a false positive on a field drug test, this may result in a domino effect where people experience significant consequences, such as losing their job or having trouble finding a new job due to the arrest appearing on their criminal record. In the story with Fox 5 Atlanta, Ms. Smeeton discusses the barriers that people face to employment and housing due to these charges appearing on background checks, even when the charges were dropped.

Check out the Fox 5 Atlanta story here.

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