Georgia prosecutors and police have repeatedly stretched the law or come under harsh criticism for their handling of a criminal conspiracy case involving protesters against a police-training center colloquially known as “Cop City”, activists and experts say.
The case has been pushed so recklessly that one of the subjects of the prosecution told the Guardian that their constitutional rights were being “blatantly violated”, after police took thousands of his personal papers in a Swat-style raid last year.
Experts have told the Guardian the case is the largest use of so-called Rico statutes against a protest movement in US history. The law has historically been used to prosecute the Mafia or organized crime, but here it is being brought to bear against an environmental and social justice movement.
The broad-based movement against the training center, now in its fourth year, has drawn national and global headlines, particularly after police shot and killed Manuel Paez Terán, or “Tortuguita”, an environmental protester who was camped in a public park near the Cop City site, last year – the first such incident of its kind in US history.
Opposition to the project has come from a wide range of local and national supporters, with concerns such as unchecked police militarization and the clearing of forests in an era of climate crisis. Atlanta police say the center is needed for “world-class” training.
The revelation about police seizing personal papers in apparent violation of the terms of a court-ordered search warrant come from recent courtroom testimon.
The hearing on 11 October at the Fulton county superior court was one of several in the last few months where Judge Kimberly Esmond Adams considered motions to dismiss all or parts of the state’s Rico indictment against 61 people, handed down by Georgia attorney general, Chris Carr, on 29 August 2023. It was the first to include multiple state witnesses.
Adams expressed concerns about the most recent evidence of state overreach, an apparent violation of the fourth amendment rights of members of the Atlanta Solidarity Fund, or ASF, a bail fund whose three members live together in a house that Atlanta police and the Georgia bureau of investigation raided in May 2023.
Adams must now decide on a remedy that will not only address the state’s apparent misconduct, but also “deter future conduct”, as she put it.
The case’s trial will not begin until next year, but defense attorneys have filed dozens of motions based on alleged prosecutorial misconduct and other issues with the case – including several involving the ASF.
The most dramatic moment in the all-day hearing occurred when Don Samuel, attorney for the ASF, wheeled 10 file boxes overflowing with papers into the courtroom. Someone had written the Atlanta address of the defendants’ house in black marker on the sides of the boxes.
Samuel picked out and held up such items as diaries, letters to a therapist, mammogram results and grade school report cards – more than 14 in total. With each one, the attorney asked Michael Carter, an agent with the Georgia bureau of investigation, on the witness stand: “Was this legitimate to seize as evidence of charity fraud?” – the state’s main charge against the bail fund in alleging its participation in a criminal conspiracy.
“No,” the detective repeatedly answered.
“There was no attention paid to what the warrant said,” Samuel asserted. “You treated it as a key to get in the front door and then do whatever you want […] You seized everything and then came up with a theory afterward.” Samuel’s motion argued that all evidence gathered during the raid should be excluded from the case.
Adams seemed to agree with Samuel’s concern. “It does seem to me that some items were seized outside the scope of the warrant,” she said, addressing John Fowler, the deputy attorney general. “How can we deter future conduct? … How can we put guardrails for law enforcement?”
The ASF claims the state has subjected it to additional misconduct, including in a motion Samuel filed in June detailing how Fowler shared with police investigators and defense attorneys emails from two of the fund’s members that contained privileged attorney-client communication. The state obtained the emails through a Google search warrant. The Guardian confirmed the motion’s allegations independently.
Samuel petitioned the court in that motion to exclude both the attorney general and the police from continuing to prosecute the case. Adams denied the motion on 30 August, but wrote in her order that she was “extremely troubled by the State’s gross negligence when handling and disclosing potentially privileged communications” and that she may decide in the future to exclude all the emails obtained from trial.
“[T]he State is strongly admonished that future misconduct will result in additional sanctions,” she concluded.
The most recent hearing also made clear that the state had blown all deadlines to share its multiple terabytes of evidence with defense, as attorneys representing two additional defendants had not received video and audio of their clients until days before.
Chris Carraway, attorney for defendant Sonali Gupta, told the Guardian he received 25 gigabytes of evidence concerning his client on the Wednesday before the hearing – despite the court ordering Fowler to turn over all evidence by 17 May.
“We’re continuing to see evidence that the prosecution … is not up to the task they set for themselves,” said Marlon Kautz, a member of the bail fund. “They’re unable to meet the burden of responsibilities of handling evidence, and just kind of fumbling.”
At the same time, he said, the state’s case has a real-world impact, including on him and his housemates. The state holding onto their personal papers for more than a year is “beyond inconvenient. It’s incredibly violating,” he said.
“They’re just pushing it [the case] along for as long as possible, to cause as much harm as possible to the 61 defendants, and to the movement in general,” he added.
As for the Swat-style raid last May, he said: “It seems clear the police who conducted the raid were not trying to respect the constitutional rights we had – they’re not only willing to violate our fourth amendment rights, but didn’t even seem aware [in court] that we had those rights.”
Kautz hopes the case can “make an example of instances where rights are blatantly violated … [and] can establish precedence for how political prosecutions are handled in the future”.
