JACKSON, Ga. — Lily Engleman is finally experiencing some closure tonight after a five-year battle with the Georgia Department of Corrections.
"It had nothing to do with me... it was everything about who I represented in my job and that was really, really scary," Engleman said.
Engleman was assigned to a high-profile case representing Ricky Dubose.
He faced a double-murder trial for killing two prison guards aboard a transport bus in Putnam County.
A state corrections investigator falsely claimed surveillance video showed Engleman passing something illegal to DuBose.
She was arrested during that September meeting.
"I felt targeted because I knew that this was fraudulent," Engleman said. "Obviously, I knew I'd never given my client anything. I knew that they wouldn't find anything on him."
Engleman was fired from the Georgia Capital Defender's Office as a result of the charges.
"There was this element of understanding that I didn't have control over my own life," Engleman said.
Prosecutors dropped the contraband charge against her in 2021.
In February of this year, that same investigator admitted to a judge that the video did not show her passing any contraband to Dubose.
"The judge really backed him into a corner and forced him to say 'I admit the video doesn't show that,'" Engleman said. "It's frustrating to me that he couldn't do the right thing until this federal judge literally forced him to."
Engleman's law firm says the investigator also used false evidence and withheld other evidence that backed her case, which they call a "terrifying abuse of power" by the corrections department.
Now that the case is closed, Engleman has one message for others, especially law enforcement agencies.
"It's not okay to arrest someone for doing their job because you don't like the job that they do," Engleman said. "I think that most people who work in criminal defense feel this kind of pervasive hatred to some extent, especially people who work on murder cases in which the death penalty is being sought because those cases are always pretty high profile. People who work in criminal defense feel like we are really good citizens [and] that we are upholding people's constitutional rights and that there is a lot of honor in that."
Engleman says she would likely still be in death penalty work if this incident had never happened.
She's since been able to renew her social work license and is actively working as a mitigation specialist for federal felony cases.