Georgia prosecutors are facing what one expert called “probably the highest-profile failure of using conspiracy charges to indict a protest movement” in US history, after a two-year attempt to prosecute a criminal conspiracy in connection with opposition to the police training center known as Cop City.
Fulton county superior court Judge Kevin Farmer announced his decision to dismiss charges against the case’s 61 defendants during hearings this week on a handful of defense attorney motions.
The hearings came after several years of delays in the case centered on Rico, a law created to go after the mafia and usually associated with organized crime, not protest movements. Farmer’s decision responded to a motion filed on behalf of defendant Thomas Jurgens, an attorney acting as a legal observer for the National Lawyers Guild at a music festival on 5 March 2023 in a forested public park near the police training center site.
Jurgens was one of dozens arrested that day and charged in connection with damage done to construction machinery at the site.
After an hour-plus of discussion in this week’s hearing, Farmer came back from a break and used only 18 words to stymie the state’s prosecution, nearly three years after arrests: “At this time I do not find the attorney general had the authority to bring this Rico case.”
The decision dismisses charges in 100 pages of the state’s 109–page indictment. It also covers one count of arson against five defendants, and the judge is expected to issue a separate ruling on domestic terrorism charges against the same five defendants.
Farmer said he will soon issue the orders in writing.
The state has announced its intention to appeal. “The attorney general will continue the fight against domestic terrorists and violent criminals who want to destroy life and property,” Georgia attorney general Chris Carr’s office said in a statement.
Carr is running for governor of Georgia in next year’s race.
Opposition to the $109m center, which opened this spring, has come from a wide range of local and national organizations and protesters, and is centered on concerns around police militarization and clearing forests in an era of climate crisis. Atlanta police say the center is needed for “world-class” training and to attract new officers.
This week’s decision “exposes that the indictment was fundamentally flawed from the outset”, said Brad Thomson, one of the case’s dozens of defense attorneys and a member of the People’s Law Office, a Chicago-based civil rights firm.
Farmer’s ruling from the bench was based on Carr’s office having pursued the case after district attorneys for Dekalb and Fulton counties had declined to do so. This was an action for which the state had no authority, and for which the attorney general would have required special permission from Georgia Governor Brian Kemp, the judge said. No such permission was sought or given.
The decision shows “what critics said all along – that the state of Georgia was in such a rush and panic to stop the ‘Stop Cop City’ movement that they violated their own rules,” said social movement historian Dan Berger. “They acted inappropriately and without justification, to bring what seemed from the beginning as dramatically overblown and patently absurd charges.”
Although certainly the most dramatic, the state’s procedural negligence leading to the judge’s decision was not the only example of prosecutorial sloppiness during the last two years.
Deputy attorney general John Fowler, the case’s lead prosecutor, was found last year to have obtained emails between defendants and their attorneys, then including them in discovery materials and sharing them with police investigators, thereby violating attorney-client privilege.
Fowler also denied in court that police sent messages about Cop City using Signal, despite being presented, in another motion from defense attorneys, with evidence from the Guardian of law enforcement leadership ordering officers last year to download the encrypted phone app for that very purpose.
At one point this week, the judge noted that he had read all the defense’s motions, but had received no responses from the state. “I have nothing to read from the state – and it’s been two years,” Farmer said.
Representing members of Atlanta Solidarity Fund – a bail fund whose three members are mentioned more than 120 times in the indictment – veteran attorney Donald Samuel told the judge this week, “the [criminal] enterprise is defined as a movement – can you imagine that? The civil rights movement would be defined as an enterprise according to the attorney general!”
Joseph Brown, a political scientist who has written about the movement against Cop City, said that Georgia “was so hellbent on criminalizing a protest movement that was strong, resilient and popularly-supported … [it] decided to use the law as a political tool.”
Brown compared the case to the so-called J20 protesters, more than 200 of whom were arrested at a 2017 protest in Washington, targeting Donald Trump’s first presidential inauguration. They faced felony riot and conspiracy charges of conspiracy. In a case drawn out over more than a year, the state was found to have withheld evidence as well as committing other irregularities. Ultimately, nearly all the cases were dismissed, and only one person served jail time.
“We see examples of prosecutorial overreach in highly politicized cases,” Brown said.
Farmer’s decision makes the Cop City case “probably the highest-profile failure of using conspiracy charges to indict a protest movement”, he added.
Brown said the two cases also have in common that defendants stuck together, and didn’t “point fingers” at each other for plea deals. “In a political movement” like this, he said, “people care about each other”.
Will Potter, author of the recently released Little Red Barns, a decade-long investigation of factory farms and fascism, said the lessons of the case could be important under Trump’s second term, which has seen the US slide towards authoritarianism.
“The playbook–stretching laws like Rico to cast dissent as organized crime won’t vanish, especially amid a surge of authoritarian and openly fascist politics,” Potter said.
