Ahen this week, during the arraignment of 61 defendants accused of criminal conspiracy in connection with an Atlanta protest movement, the bailiff could be heard calling out the numbers of the next batch like a crowded deli at lunchtime.
The courtroom's six wooden benches were filled with lawyers and defendants, with a row at the back reserved for the media. Fulton County Superior Court Judge Kimberly M. Esmond Adams spent about four hours going over the charges with the defendants, all of which are related to opposition to a proposed police and fire training center called “Cop City.”
The proceedings offered a glimpse into the future of a case that is more far-reaching than any previous attempt to use a Rico Law against a protest movement. The use of the Rico Law against the group – a law designed to combat organized crime – has outraged civil rights groups, who see it as a deliberate attempt to demonize legitimate protesters as domestic terrorists and suppress dissent.
Experts and those involved are now predicting a chaotic, lengthy and uncertain process as authorities in Georgia try to use the legal system against a protest movement focused on issues such as deforestation in the wake of the climate crisis, the militarization of the police and environmental racism.
“I've never seen anything like this,” said attorney Eli Bennett, whose firm is representing three of the 61 defendants. “The magnitude of having to deal with that many people in a courtroom … This is completely unprecedented … and it's only going to get worse,” said Bennett, who has practiced criminal defense in Georgia for nearly a decade.
The magnitude of the case was clear from the start, when Georgia Assistant Attorney General John Fowler told the judge that the state would have to send defense attorneys five terabytes of evidence, which could take two months. That's the equivalent of about 400 million pages of text or 800,000 digital photos.
A conversation ensued between Adams and Fowler about how long it would take the lawyers to go through so much material. The answer: about four months. “The logistical impossibility of this type of prosecution is clear from the very beginning of this case,” Bennett said.
A protester holds a sign with a picture of Manuel Paez Terán, who was shot and killed by state police officers during a Cop City protest. Photo: Arvin Temkar/AP
The five terabytes are believed to contain the file compiled by the Georgia Bureau of Investigation as part of its investigation into the death of 26-year-old activist Manuel Paez Terán, also known as “Tortuguita.” He was shot and killed by police officers on Jan. 18 in a wooded public park near the Cop City construction site. A special prosecutor released a report last month concluding that the shooting was “objectively reasonable,” in part because the state contends that Paez Terán fired first, wounding a police officer. The GBI said at the time it would not release the evidence because a separate investigation into the movement itself was underway.
At the beginning of the trial on Monday, it also became clear that at least a dozen defendants still did not have legal representation, while others only met their lawyers when they appeared before the judge.
The judge gave the Southern Center for Human Rights a week to inform the court whether it had resolved that point. “We're trying to fill the gap,” said Devin Franklin, the movement's policy adviser at the center, an Atlanta-based nonprofit that is coordinating the search for lawyers and raising money to pay legal fees for most of the group. He expects litigation costs in the case could reach as much as $12 million.
For the defendants, the trial did not end in the courtroom, as most of them had not yet turned themselves in at the Fulton County Jail, where they had to remain until the judge signed and mailed bail agreements signed by all parties. This put a strain on the overcrowded jail, which Franklin told the Guardian is “probably the worst run and most dangerous jail in the country,” with five people dying there in August alone.
The Atlanta Solidarity Fund – one of nearly 100 similar organizations across the U.S. that raise money to help arrested protesters with bail, legal counsel and similar needs – said the total cost of meeting the defendants' bail in the Rico case would be “hundreds of thousands of dollars.”
But the three fund members are also targets of the prosecution after they were arrested in a SWAT-style raid at their Atlanta home. Their attorney in the Rico case, Don Samuel, is one of the most senior of the dozens of Georgia bar attorneys involved in the case. He has four decades of criminal law experience and has written a book on Georgia criminal law.
In a September panel discussion on the case, Samuel outlined that Georgia has been using the Rico Law more and more in recent years. It was originally developed to combat the mafia, and Georgia prosecutors are currently using it against former President Donald Trump and rapper Young Thug. But unlike those cases, Samuel said, the 109-page indictment against Cop City, filed by Attorney General Chris Carr, never makes clear who the criminal enterprise is or what the criminal scheme is.
“There is not a single act of organised crime alleged,” he told the panel. “Some aspects of it are absolutely incomprehensible,” he added.
The “overt acts” mentioned in the indictment in connection with his clients involve “various protected activities,” Samuel noted, including “spending money to help some of the protesters get food – God forbid – or, you know, to pay for a bus fare or to get out of jail on bail.”
The veteran attorney also stressed that the Dekalb County District Attorney has recused herself from the case and that Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis – who is overseeing the Trump and Young Thug cases – “doesn't want anything to do with it.”
This “tells you pretty much everything you need to know about the genesis of this case,” Samuel said. “It's coming from the Attorney General's office because he's trying to become the next governor of Georgia, and [current governor Brian] Kemp supports him. It is clearly a politically motivated case.”
