After months of stonewalling by Georgia prosecutors, defense attorneys were allowed on Tuesday to visit the forest at the center of the state’s criminal conspiracy case against a movement opposing the police training center colloquially known as “Cop City” – only to come away frustrated by how much things had changed on the ground.
The attorneys also found confusion about where arrests and alleged crimes occurred during the last two years, according to a handful who spoke to the Guardian.
“[W]e were provided very little to no guidance as to the alleged location of … events such as … arrests, camp sites or locations of any other police or protest activities that are part of the case,” said Drago Cepar, one of at least 30 attorneys who visited the South River Forest south-east of Atlanta.
Several attorneys told the Guardian they asked deputy attorney general John Fowler about such details, only to have the prosecutor say he didn’t know, or give answers later confirmed to be incorrect. Although the attorneys hiked for several hours in a wooded area spanning hundreds of acres that include a public park and the Cop City construction site, Fowler basically told them, “go and look around”, Cepar said.
One thing several attorneys were able to confirm: any defendants arrested in the public park where protesters camped for more than a year could not have been “trespassing”, as arrest warrants alleged. Signs are now posted in that part of the forest saying the area has been off limits to the public only since DeKalb county closed down the park in March 2023 – after all arrests occurred.
Still, the visit was frustrating, they said. Several attorneys noted that the state prohibited them from bringing their clients to the forest, which the state calls a “crime scene”. This added to the difficulty locating scenes of arrests and alleged crimes.
“Without having the clients physically with us, it was impossible to know exactly where things happened,” said Xavier de Janon, who filed a motion with Fulton county superior court earlier this month seeking to have all charges related to arrests in the forest dismissed due to the state’s refusal to schedule the visits.
De Janon’s motion was the second in recent weeks centering on Fowler’s apparent mishandling of the case. Another filed in late June highlighted how the deputy attorney general violated attorney-client privilege by sharing emails between defendants and their attorneys with Atlanta police investigators – instead of excluding them from evidence.
De Janon and other attorneys had petitioned the state to visit the forest for at least seven months. After public pressure and media coverage bringing the motion to light – including in the Guardian – and after Fowler blew past a court-ordered June deadline, the attorney general’s office finally relented, spreading the visits out over this week and last.
The state’s case centers on Rico, or criminal conspiracy law – originally developed to prosecute the mafia. It names 61 people in what experts have told the Guardian is the largest number of defendants ever in a Rico case involving a protest or social movement. The state’s indictment, handed down on 29 August 2023, mentions the word “forest” 310 times in 109 pages, according to De Janon’s motion.
The Cop City training center is being built on a 171-acre footprint in the forest. A wide range of local and national protesters have expressed concerns from unchecked police militarization to clearing forests in an era of climate crisis. Atlanta police and the Atlanta Police Foundation say the center is needed for “world-class” training.
Twenty-three of the defendants were arrested on 5 March 2023 – including De Janon’s client, James “Jamie” Marsicano. A music festival was held on that date in Intrenchment Creek Park, the public park separated from the Atlanta-owned Cop City site by the creek that gives the park its name.
As many as 1,000 people visited the festival or camped in the park during the March “week of action” held in opposition to the training center. In the late afternoon, at least 100 people, most wearing masks, left the festival’s site and walked nearly a mile to the construction site, where they burned equipment and set off fireworks, chasing off Atlanta police – who filmed the acts.
But attorneys were also prevented from visiting the construction site, now fenced off from the surrounding forest. This also made the experience “incomplete”, De Janon said.
Another clear issue is that Intrenchment Creek Park has been closed to the public for 16 months, and the training center site cleared of trees and under construction, meaning the state’s alleged “crime scene” has changed greatly.
“All you can do is get a feel for the land,” said attorney Brian Tevis. “If this site visit were to be of more value, it probably should have occurred shortly after arrests occurred,” he said.
Several attorneys noted how large and beautiful the forest is – secondary-growth woods filled with loblolly pines and water oaks.
“I had no idea such a forest existed, and so close to the city,” said attorney Suri Chadha Jiménez.
The state permitted De Janon to bring an expert – Jacqueline Echols, board president of the South River Watershed Alliance, who has been visiting the forest for nearly 15 years. She was most stirred when looking over the construction site.
“It’s an ecological disaster,” Echols said. “The land has been stripped down to clay, the topsoil has been cleared …[I]t would take a long time for this land to heal enough to support life.”
