Hill’s Godson Won Clayton County’s Sheriff Race by 266 Votes

Levon Allen won Clayton County’s sheriff special election by 266 votes on April 18, 2023, taking the badge a federal prison sentence had just opened. The interim sheriff, Victor Hill’s godson and former chief deputy, beat Clarence Cox 7,716 to 7,450 in a runoff that drew well under a tenth of the county’s more than 200,000 registered voters.

Five men had run a week after Hill was sentenced. The winner was the man Hill had already put in the chair.

Allen Beat Cox by 266 Votes in an April Runoff

The first round on March 21, 2023, never produced a majority. Secretary of State results with every precinct in showed Allen at 47.01 percent and Cox at 28.61 percent. Chris Storey, Dwayne Fabian and Terry Evans trailed. Georgia law sent the top two back on April 18.

Clayton County Elections Office figures from that Tuesday are the ones that still stand.

THE 2023 SHERIFF BALLOTS

Those 15,166 runoff ballots came from a county with more than 200,000 people on the rolls. Turnout stayed under 10 percent. Allen had been sworn as interim sheriff in December 2022 after Roland Boehrer, another interim, retired. The April win was his first time holding the office by a vote.

Hill’s Prison Sentence Landed a Week Before the Vote

A federal jury in Atlanta convicted Hill on October 26, 2022, on six of seven counts of depriving pretrial detainees of their rights. The U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Northern District of Georgia said he ordered six men strapped into restraint chairs for hours with no legal basis, even though they were not violent or out of control. One detainee urinated three times in the chair.

U.S. District Judge Eleanor L. Ross sentenced him on March 14, 2023, to 18 months in federal prison and six years of supervised release, during which he 18 months in federal prison cannot be rewritten as a return to a badge: the judgment bars any role in law enforcement. The FBI investigated. Assistant U.S. Attorneys Brent Alan Gray and Bret R. Hobson prosecuted.

Hill had run Clayton County as sheriff from 2005 to 2008 and again from 2013 to 2022, styling himself “The Crime Fighter” and using Batman images in ads. On his first day in 2005 he fired dozens of deputies; a judge later put them back. Voters returned him in 2012 while he was under a separate indictment, and a jury later acquitted him on those charges. In 2016 he pleaded no contest to reckless conduct after he shot and injured a woman while practicing tactics in a Gwinnett County model home.

Hill had fair warning that his conduct was unconstitutional, that he could not use gratuitous force against a compliant, nonresistant detainee.

U.S. Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit, United States v. Hill, April 29, 2024

The panel, in an opinion by Judge Robin Rosenbaum, found the six chair orders lasted at least four hours, with hands cuffed and no bathroom breaks, and that the jury had enough evidence the force had no legitimate nonpunitive purpose. The court also said Hill had fair warning that his conduct was unconstitutional. Georgia’s Peace Officer Standards and Training Council later stripped his certification. He reported to prison in May 2023, spent about 10 months in federal custody in Arkansas, and moved in March 2024 into community confinement under the bureau’s Atlanta residential reentry office.

FROM CONVICTION TO THE RUNOFF

1. October 26, 2022: A federal jury convicts Hill on six of seven civil-rights counts.
2. November 2022: Hill retires from the sheriff’s office.
3. December 2022: Allen is sworn as interim sheriff after Roland Boehrer retires.
4. March 14, 2023: Judge Ross imposes 18 months plus six years of supervised release.
5. March 21, 2023: The five-way special election fails to produce a majority.
6. April 18, 2023: Allen wins the runoff by 266 votes.
7. April 29, 2024: The 11th Circuit affirms the conviction.

A later civil jury, in December 2025, awarded Glenn Howell $600,000 in compensatory damages over the same chair. The punitive-damages phase ended in a mistrial. Hill remains a felon, and he remains barred from the work he spent two decades performing.

Five Candidates and the Interim Already in Place

Atlanta News First checked each 2023 candidate against POST files before the March 21 vote. The records and the campaign pitches lined up this way.

THE MARCH 21 FIELD

• Levon Allen: Interim sheriff, Hill’s godson and former chief deputy, with time in the Georgia National Guard, the Army Reserve, the DeKalb County Sheriff’s Office and Clayton since 2013. POST files showed a domestic violence charge and three other disciplinary incidents.
• Clarence Cox: Thirty-eight years in policing, a former Clayton deputy, former Clayton County schools police chief, and then chief investigator for Fulton’s solicitor general. He ran on transparency.
• Dwayne Fabian: Thirty-one years in policing. His campaign said he would restore integrity to the office.
• Chris Storey: Twenty-four years in the work, campaigning on honesty and ethical leadership.
• Terry Evans: A mix of county leadership jobs and a promise to keep justice inside the law. POST files showed two domestic violence incidents. He did not answer interview requests.

Allen had told Hill as far back as 2008 that he wanted the job. Hill endorsed him for the interim post and for the special election. Cox was the only rival who forced a second round. Early voting was already open when the candidate survey ran in mid-March.

The sheriff in Clayton County runs the jail. A separate county police department, with a chief named by the commission, handles most street patrol. That split mattered later, when Allen began asking local chiefs to write tickets instead of filling cells, and when he kept Hill’s habit of public fugitive roundups outside the jail walls.

Deaths Inside the Jail Doubled in 2024

Allen told interviewers he wanted staff to treat detainees like family and to offer “Disney World and Chick-fil-A customer service.” He also inherited a lockup that was already past its design. The sheriff’s office lists 1,536 beds. In February 2024 the count was about 1,900 people, with 400 to 500 sleeping on the floor.

I got four to 500 inmates that are sleeping on the floor daily, and that’s a problem. If the jail and the sheriff’s office do not have proper funding, lives are at risk every day.

Levon Allen, Clayton County sheriff, jail tour, February 2024

He said he had asked the Board of Commissioners for $20 million and received $3 million. Roof leaks, bad locks, and three people stuffed into two-person cells were on the tour. After 27-year-old Johnathan Pettigrew was beaten to death in an overcrowded cell in January 2024, the office itself called the room a “deadly cage match” of steel, metal and concrete.

THE JAIL DEATH TALLY

• 2023 deaths: Four people died in custody, the year Allen first won the office.
• 2024 deaths: Eight people died, twice the year before, including two homicides inside the jail.
• Overcrowding: About 1,900 people in a 1,536-bed jail, with 400 to 500 on the floor.
• Medical contract: FirstClass Healthcare replaced CorrectHealth in October 2024 on a nine-month deal worth almost $15 million, with a higher bill if the count tops 1,800.

Sen. Jon Ossoff asked the Justice Department to investigate the jail in September 2023, after those four deaths. The department never announced a Clayton inquiry. It did, in 2024, find Georgia’s state prisons and Atlanta’s Fulton County Jail in violation of the Constitution, which left Clayton’s own federal file unopened while neighboring lockups drew findings.

Medical notes from the old vendor are grim. Alan Willison wrote, “NEED TO GO TO THE HOSPITAL,” and “I HAVE MAJOR PAIN AND SOMETHING WRONG WITH PRIVATE PARTS,” then died of testicular cancer on January 26, 2023; the county medical examiner found neglect played a part, and his mother’s suit says a urologist’s call for emergency surgery was never returned. Perez Denis Martinez, 23, wrote that he felt weak, had not eaten in days, and was hearing voices; he later collapsed, was sent back toward general population, fell again, and died of hypertrophic cardiomyopathy. DeWayne Driscoll told medical staff he could not breathe, went back to the floor, and died after a seizure and cardiac arrest. Families looking for how those cases land in court still start with an inmate death at the Clayton County Jail and the same housing units.

Allen said some 2024 deaths were medical and some were “tempers and moments of anger.” He said he had released “well over 1,000” people held on low-level charges and had told chiefs to write tickets for driving on a suspended license, because “we just do not have the space.” His office kept no list of those releases. In December 2024, at least 15 people were still being booked on traffic and other minor charges on a single day.

The 2024 Rematch Hill Tried to Stop

Hill got out of prison housing in 2024 and immediately went after the man he had endorsed. He wrote that the office was $14 million over budget, that secretaries had patrol cars, and that friends and relatives were on the payroll with open-ended overtime. He blamed three jail killings on “mismanagement.” Those figures were his claims, not an audit.

What was documented was a $3 million buy of electric take-home cars for staff, made while Allen was asking the county for more jail money, and tens of thousands of public dollars spent promoting him during the 2023 race. Allen said critics of the car fleet “ought to be ashamed of themselves.” He also said he would not be a “political puppet under his control.”

This is a copy of the ACLU letter sent to sheriff Levon Allen describing what many mothers have contacted me about out of concern for the safety and wellbeing of their sons and daughters in the Clayton County jail. Will discuss this and more tomorrow.#victorhillforsheriff pic.twitter.com/T91xNi1BSa

— SheriffVictorHill (@SheriffVHill) November 5, 2025

Hill was still posting in November 2025 as if the badge were in play, sharing an ACLU letter about mothers worried for sons and daughters in the jail and tagging the message for a sheriff run he is legally barred from joining. The 2024 Democratic primary still went to a runoff. Allen fell just short of 50 percent on May 21 against Jeffrey E. Turner, then the county commission chairman and a former Clayton police chief, plus Cox and Charlene Watson-Fraser.

On June 18, 2024, Allen took 7,602 votes to Turner’s 6,161, more than 55 percent. No Republican filed for November, so that runoff closed the term. The same night, Tashe’ Allen, the sheriff’s wife, won the District 3 commission seat, which means she is among the officials who vote when his office asks for money. Allen told supporters, “It can’t stop, it won’t stop,” and “We are going upward in Clayton County.”

The County Is Still Paying for Hill’s Jail

The 2023 race did not freeze the lawsuits Hill left behind. By April 2025, Clayton County had paid more than $5.6 million to resolve Hill-era jail cases. The largest single check was $5 million to Gabriel Arries, approved unanimously on July 11, 2024.

Arries, a Los Angeles man arrested while changing planes at Hartsfield-Jackson on his way to his parents in Virginia, said deputies beat him and strapped him in a restraint chair until he was found unresponsive. He spent months in the hospital with a traumatic brain injury. His mother, Francie Cate-Arries, said a Major Allen at the jail called to say her son had swelling and bleeding on the brain and to wait for a trauma surgeon. The county admitted no wrongdoing. Arries, who now works as a dishwasher and lives with his mother, said, “They should shut that jail down.”

HILL-ERA PAYOUTS ON THE BOOKS

Handsford, a deputy diagnosed with rheumatoid arthritis, said Hill blocked promotions, dropped him four ranks, and had him fired in 2019, then tried to keep him out of the courthouse and out of other police work. Sheriff Allen inherited that suit and settled it. Howell’s $600,000 came after the $5.6 million running total was already on the books, so it sits on top of that earlier sum, not inside it. Cox, still a critic, has warned that the pile of cases is a bill for taxpayers, not only for the men who ran the jail.

Guzman Walked Out, Then a Jailer Pleaded Guilty

On March 25, 2025, the jail released Kathan Guzman, who was serving life for murdering his girlfriend. The office did not notice for two weeks. The district attorney’s office called on April 8 to ask where he was. Guzman spent those days free, then was caught in Florida. Allen blamed a decades-old computer system and a training failure, and said workers had not paid attention. Cox called it a series of errors with “no excuse.”

The Guzman hole was not the only one. Since late 2022 the office has had to account for other mistaken releases, an escape in cuffs, contractors arrested for smuggling, and a 46-count indictment that alleged jail staff ran drugs, money and favors with detainees. Training for jailers is a two-week basic course; state sheriff officials say low pay and hard conditions make it difficult to keep people in the jobs.

Force cases did not end with Hill. On May 16, 2024, correctional officer Jabin Bethea slammed a detainee’s head into a wall, threw him down, and, with the man on the floor and following orders, tased him at least six times. Bethea pleaded guilty to using excessive force on December 10, 2025. A federal judge set sentencing for March 10, 2026.

On April 1, 2026, Michael Hunt died after he was found unresponsive in a mental-health unit during a meal. Investigators said Jalen Leverette hit and stomped him. Leverette’s charges were raised to malice murder. Allen said the jail then held 155 people charged with taking a life and was 300 people over its design. “A jail is not a college campus. It is not an amusement park like Six Flags or Disney World,” he said. “It is a detention facility housing individuals charged with serious and violent crimes.”

Carol Yancey, a Clayton community advocate, has said Allen is an improvement on Hill. The vote count agrees with her on the politics. The jail roster, the settlement docket, and the Guzman file are the rest of the record the 2023 special election left behind.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who Won the 2023 Clayton County Sheriff Special Election?

No one won outright on March 21, 2023, because no candidate cleared 50 percent plus one. Levon Allen then beat Clarence Cox in the April 18 runoff, 7,716 to 7,450, on 15,166 ballots in a county with more than 200,000 registered voters, and that remaining-term seat is what he later converted into a full term in 2024.

Why Did Clayton County Hold a Sheriff Special Election in 2023?

Victor Hill retired after a federal jury convicted him, leaving an unexpired term. Roland Boehrer served briefly as interim sheriff, then retired, and the county set March 21, 2023, to fill the rest of the term rather than wait for the next regular cycle.

What Was Victor Hill Convicted Of and What Was His Sentence?

A jury found him guilty on six of seven counts under 18 U.S.C. § 242 for willfully depriving pretrial detainees of constitutional rights by ordering them into restraint chairs as punishment. Judge Eleanor L. Ross imposed 18 months in prison and six years of supervised release with a ban on any law-enforcement role, after an FBI investigation prosecuted by Assistant U.S. Attorneys Brent Alan Gray and Bret R. Hobson.

Does the Clayton County Sheriff Run the County Police Department?

No. The sheriff runs the jail and related custody work, while Clayton County keeps a separate police department whose chief is appointed by the Board of Commissioners, a split that lets the sheriff control the lockup without commanding street patrol.

What Is the Georgia POST Council in a Sheriff Race?

The Peace Officer Standards and Training Council is the state body that certifies Georgia peace officers and stores discipline files, and those files were the source used to check the 2023 candidates, including Allen’s domestic violence charge and three other incidents and Evans’s two domestic violence incidents, before POST later revoked Hill’s own certification.