The (24, 12, 8) extended binary Golay code is a well-known rate-1/2 short block-length linear error-correcting code with remarkable properties. This paper investigates the design of an efficient low-complexity soft-decision decoding architecture for this code. A dedicated algorithm is introduced that takes advantage of the code’s properties to simplify the decoding process. Simulation results show that the proposed algorithm achieves close to maximum-likelihood performance with low computational cost. The decoder architecture is described, and VLSI synthesis results are presented.