Igniting Hope Georgia believes those who have experienced domestic violence (DV) and/or incarceration can best direct community solutions. To that end, we constantly work to build relationships with local shelters and centers providing on-the-ground, responsive services to DV and sexual assault victims, and with other organizations and coalitions working to eradicate the harms caused by intimate partner violence.

We also stand in solidarity with the criminalized survivors we serve by fostering their family bonds and advocating for access to quality higher education while they serve their sentences, by providing them with holistic reentry support upon release, and by generally helping them to plug back into our communities, including through sustainable agriculture.

Our top priority is advocating for the release of DV survivors serving immoderate prison sentences, especially considering circumstances of family violence which directly lead to the event which saw the person to prison.

Igniting Hope Georgia is not a law firm, but we strongly believe finding solutions to issues found at the intersection of family violence, death, and criminal prosecutions requires having conversations and partnering with policymakers, defense attorneys, and prosecutors. We support the mounting interest in conviction and sentence integrity units, and champion district attorneys who leverage their discretion to revisit cases where known DV issues were not properly considered at the trial phase.

From a public policy perspective, it is our prerogative to stay up-to-date on current trends in DV-related homicide prosecutions throughout the state. We also pay attention to how evidence is handled and introduced in these types of trials nationally, and how evidentiary standards are developed and implemented. We are also particularly interested in how recent changes to Georgia's family violence law are playing out in terms of law enforcement response and engagement.

Following discussions with several district attorneys and criminal defense attorneys across Georgia, the need for in-depth research into how survivor cases had been prosecuted in years past became clear. It became Igniting Hope Georgia's goal to figure out where and how individuals who defended themselves or their children to the death against an abusive partner were charged and/or convicted, and to see how the circumstances and sentences compared and contrasted with each other and with the way those cases are treated today.