Gov. Nathan Deal has a tradition of giving gifts when he swears in a new judge: gavels mounted on plaques with the recipients’ names. They come with a story. The governor wants members of the bench to know the mementos are made by inmates in Georgia prisons.
He’s been giving out a lot of them lately: nine in the past year alone just for the appellate courts. Through a combination of design and circumstance, by the time he finishes his second term in January 2019, Deal will have chosen five justices of nine on the Georgia Supreme Court, 10 of 15 members of the Georgia Court of Appeals and more than 100 of the 213 superior court judges in the state.
