In Brunswick Circuit counties, most contracts don’t hold lawyers accountable for prosecuting juvenile cases

Since District Attorney Keith Higgins stopped handling juvenile cases in late 2024, the five counties in the Brunswick Judicial Circuit have outsourced juvenile prosecution to contract attorneys under terms that provide scant public accountability in four of the counties, an investigation by The Current GA found.

The Current’s investigation into the contracts raised questions about the counties’ oversight of outside attorneys, the mounting costs to taxpayers, and whether children are receiving fair treatment in local courts.

The unusual situation has evolved amid a more than two-year-old political feud between the D.A. and the county commissioners in Glynn, Camden, Appling, Jeff Davis and Wayne counties, who accuse Higgins of mismanaging more than $1 million in local funding for his office, according to a complaint to the Prosecuting Attorneys Qualifications Commission (PAQC) obtained by The Current.

Yet The Current found that four counties in the circuit have been paying attorneys flat monthly fees to represent the state in prosecuting juveniles, with no requirement that the contractors detail the cases they handled or the hours they worked on each case in invoices submitted for payment. The system bucks a widely established industry standard by which lawyers detail work associated with client cases. In contrast, the fifth county in the circuit, Camden, pays an attorney an hourly rate and requires that attorney to provide invoices detailing the work done in juvenile court.

Legal experts told The Current that both flat fee and hourly arrangements have advantages and disadvantages. But the experts said that a lack of documentation about case work was alarming.

“You would expect some documentation of the case management, because you have to ensure that they are providing the services that you’re paying for,” said Melissa Redmon, former Metro Atlanta prosecutor and Prosecutorial Justice Program Director at The University of Georgia.

Higgins is the first and only district attorney in Georgia to relinquish juvenile prosecutions, and trigger a legal provision allowing governments to contract for a replacement, according to the Prosecuting Attorneys’ Council of Georgia (PAC). A 2013 rewrite  of the juvenile code made it possible.

The outsourcing of juvenile cases to contract attorneys in the Brunswick Circuit has now raised new questions about whether justice is being administered without racial discrimination and without personal bias, according to three attorneys The Current interviewed.

“It’s very important to see how they handle things, and make sure there’s uniformity, and make sure that a certain county is not treating a certain demographic a different way,” said Ada Zeno, a local attorney and former assistant district attorney in the Brunswick Judicial Circuit. “No one is telling these attorneys what to do, or there’s no guideline that they necessarily have to follow, except ethics.” 

While juvenile court judges have the final say in juvenile cases, prosecutors play a significant role in the process. They oversee witness coordination, decide whether to send cases to the superior court and make the prosecutorial charging decision — whether to dismiss, divert or proceed with charges.

The Current’s analysis of the juvenile attorney contracts shows that in four counties, the private attorneys are legally obligated to the county commissions with whom they contracted, not to Higgins, whom voters selected as the circuit’s chief prosecutor. In the fifth county, Wayne, a contract attorney assists the elected county solicitor, who is also contracted by the county for juvenile work.

Four of the county governments defended the juvenile court contract structures; one, Jeff Davis, declined comment. Most of the counties said they anticipated continuing the same contracts for the foreseeable future.

Brittany Dozier, Glynn County communications director, wrote that the county chose a monthly flat-fee arrangement because it was “the most effective and cost-efficient approach for providing continuous full-service docket coverage.”

“It emphasizes responsible stewardship of taxpayer dollars, budgetary predictability, and full accountability to get the job done without hourly micromanagement constraints,” Dozier wrote.

The Current independently sought to learn how the contract attorneys were meeting their obligations to handle juvenile cases and meet deadlines.

None agreed to be interviewed.

A budget fight, then a rupture

The counties’ impasse with Higgins began in mid-2024 and has grown increasingly acrimonious and contentious since then.

Glynn, which handled payroll processing for the district attorney’s office on behalf of the other counties, notified Higgins in early 2024 that his office was approximately $842,000 over budget for fiscal year 2024. Higgins requested a supplemental budget of approximately $362,000 for staffing. The county denied his request and threatened to cut off payroll processing unless they agreed to a repayment plan and resolved the dispute by Aug. 31.

In September, Higgins said that he would stop handling juvenile cases starting Oct. 1, 2024, to consolidate his remaining staff on felony cases, and then sued Glynn County to release funding to his office.

By December 2024, the five counties in the circuit had all contracted with attorneys to handle the juvenile caseloads in their respective jurisdictions.

The budget fight escalated in June 2025 when the five counties filed a joint complaint against Higgins with Georgia’s Prosecuting Attorneys Qualifications Commission (PAQC), alleging financial mismanagement. Higgins denied the allegations and blamed the budget problem on an accounting error, telling The Current in June 2025 that “public funds have not been misused, misplaced, or unlawfully diverted.”

Earlier in June, The Current reported that the PAQC found sufficient merit to proceed with a formal investigation into the counties’ allegations.

The 2013 law allowing Higgins to stop handling juvenile cases provided no specific guidance to governments on how to compensate an attorney hired to take over. It stated only that the attorney “shall be compensated in an amount to be fixed by the governing authority of such county.”

From October 2024 through May 2026, the five counties in the circuit have spent nearly $350,000 for their part-time juvenile attorneys, according to The Current’s analysis of the contracts. Excluding benefits, the amounts paid by the five counties could fund the $60,580 annual salaries of three full-time, entry-level assistant district attorneys (ADAs) to manage the juvenile caseloads, according to The Current’s analysis and 2024 state pay scales from PAC.

When Higgins’ office handled juvenile cases, one full-time ADA for juveniles was assigned to Glynn County, Higgins said. The four other counties each were assigned an ADA who handled both juvenile and adult cases, he said.

Higgins could not say how much money his office would need to staff juvenile cases in each of the counties.

“We don’t even get to that discussion if I don’t have adequate staff to handle the felony caseload,” Higgins told The Current in an interview. In mid-June, his office had 10 full-time ADAs and 6,426 open felony cases, Higgins said.

In 2023, the last full year when the DA’s office handled juvenile court, the circuit had 303 referrals to juvenile court, according to data from the counties and compiled by the Georgia Criminal Justice Coordinating Council (CJCC). In 2025, the first full year contract attorneys took over, the circuit had 352 referrals, according to the CJCC.

The circuit remains one of the largest in Georgia for the number of youth considered at-risk, ranking 17th out of 49 judicial circuits, according to the CJCC.

Compensation, terms vary

The pay and conditions for contract attorneys hired to take over juvenile cases varied widely among the five counties in the circuit, The Current found.

Glynn approved a contract with Coastal Law Group in Brunswick on Oct. 3, 2024. George Barnhill, an attorney with the firm, was designated lead attorney and contracted for $5,834 per month. Barnhill is the son of George Barnhill, the former Waycross district attorney who took over the Ahmaud Arbery case in 2020 after former  Brunswick district attorney Jackie Johnson recused herself.

Wayne County initially hired Kenneth Carswell, the elected county solicitor, according to Wayne County Administrator Paul Drawdy. When Carswell retired, the county continued the arrangement with Andy Beaver, the new solicitor. It also hired an attorney with Gilbert, Harrell, Sumerford, and Martin, starting Jan. 1, 2025. The county pays Beaver and the firm each $12,000 annually, plus $3,000 per year for the solicitor’s clerk.

Jeff Davis and Appling counties hired Jan Kennedy, a former assistant district attorney with 27 years of experience in the circuit. Appling contracted with her in October 2024, and Jeff Davis followed in December. Each county pays her $2,500 per month.

Alone among the group, Camden opted for an hourly contract – with supporting invoices documenting cases and hours worked. It signed an agreement with Emory Stroberg, a Brunswick attorney practicing on the coast and in north Georgia, at a rate of $125 per hour in October 2024.

Counties opt for predictability

Claire Feazel, a spokeswoman for Camden, wrote in an email that Camden opted for an hourly rate because it seemed the most appropriate for the county at the time. Feazel said that Jacqueline Fortier, the county attorney, reviews Stroberg’s invoices, which document what work Stroberg performed on specific cases.

Drawdy said Wayne chose a flat fee because the workload for juvenile cases was unpredictable. A flat fee also allowed the attorney the flexibility to accommodate the shortened timeframes that are legally required for juvenile hearings, he said.

Drawdy also said rates in the area ranged from $250 to $450 an hour, making an hourly rate more expensive. The hourly rates Drawdy cited, however, are twice or more what Camden – just a county away – negotiated with Stroberg.

Appling did not explain why it chose a flat fee instead of an hourly rate. The county’s spokeswoman, Jordyn Cravey, said the county tracks Kennedy’s performance through the monthly invoices, but those invoices do not detail that any work was performed.

Jeff Davis declined to comment on its contract with Kennedy.

Glynn chose a flat-fee arrangement because the county wanted predictable monthly expenses, Dozier, the county spokeswoman, wrote in an email.

Dozier also wrote that Barnhill’s work wasn’t suited to hourly work because he has ongoing responsibility for prosecutorial representation in juvenile court, unlike dependency attorneys who work case by case on child welfare matters.

The county does not meet with Barnhill to review his work, Dozier wrote. Instead, the county relies on the “ordinary and proper functioning of the Juvenile Court docket” to determine if Barnhill is meeting his obligations, she wrote.

“To date, the County is not aware of any complaints or negative feedback about the services being provided under the agreement,” Dozier wrote. 

While hourly arrangements tend to be more common, UGA’s Redmon said she understood why the counties would opt for a flat-fee contract. Paying hourly by the case could create a financial incentive to take more cases and bill more hours, she said. But she said that she would still expect the counties to require some level of documentation for contracts that pay a flat fee.

She also questioned the counties’ position that it was up to the court to indicate if the contract attorneys were not meeting their obligations.

“You’re waiting on a juvenile court judge or a defense attorney to say, ‘I’ve been waiting on this case to be resolved, or this case is constantly reset at the request of the contractor prosecutor,’” she said. “And that’s really not the way you want the system to proceed. It’s just everything’s fine until someone complains about it.”

Data reporter Maggie Lee assisted in this reporting.

This story was produced with the support of Report for America and Investigative Editing Corps with Ken Foskett as project editor.