At one point during the courtroom arraignment this week of 61 defendants charged with criminal conspiracy in connection with a protest movement in Atlanta, the bailiff could be heard shouting out numbers corresponding to the next batch – like a crowded delicatessen at lunch hour.
The courtroom’s six rows of wooden benches were packed with attorneys and defendants, with one row at the back reserved for media. It took about four hours for the Fulton county superior court judge Kimberly M Esmond Adams to go through the felony criminal charges with the defendants, all tied to opposition against a planned police and fire department training center known as “Cop City”.
The proceedings offered a window on to what’s to come in a case that is larger than any previous attempt to use a Rico, or racketeering law, against a protest movement. The use of Rico against the group – a set of laws developed for dealing with organized crime – has outraged civil liberties groups who see a deliberate effort to demonize legitimate protesters as domestic terrorists and suppress dissent.
Experts and those involved now predict a chaotic, lengthy and uncertain process to unfold, as Georgia authorities attempt to wield the judicial system against a protest movement largely concerned with issues such as deforestation amid the climate crisis, police militarization and environmental racism.
“I’ve never seen anything like it,” said the attorney Eli Bennett whose firm is representing three of the 61 defendants. “The sheer scale of managing this many people in a court room … It’s totally unprecedented … and it’s only going to get worse,” said Bennett, who’s been practicing criminal defense in Georgia for nearly a decade.
The case’s unwieldy scale was apparent from the start, as the Georgia deputy attorney general John Fowler explained to the judge that the state had five terabytes worth of evidence to send to defense attorneys, a process that could take two months. That’s the equivalent of about 400m pages of text, or 800,000 digital photos.
A conversation ensued between Adams and Fowler about how long it would then take attorneys to go through that much material. The answer: about four months. “The logistical impossibility of this type of prosecution is becoming apparent at the very beginning of this case,” Bennett said.
It is assumed that the five terabytes include the file the Georgia bureau of investigation compiled while investigating the death of the 26-year-old activist Manuel Paez Terán, or “Tortuguita”, who state troopers shot and killed on 18 January in a forested 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 alleges that Paez Terán shot first, wounding an officer. The GBI then said it wouldn’t release the evidence, due to a separate investigation into the movement itself.
Early in Monday’s proceedings, it also became clear that at least a dozen defendants still had not obtained counsel, while others were meeting their attorneys for the first time the moment they stood before the judge.
The judge gave the Southern Center for Human Rights a week to let the court know if that issue had been resolved. “We’re trying to fill the gap,” said Devin Franklin, movement policy counsel at the center, an Atlanta non-profit organization coordinating the effort to locate attorneys and raise funds to pay legal fees for most of the group. He anticipates legal costs in the case could reach up to $12m.
Nor did the process for the defendants end at the courtroom, as most of them had not yet turned themselves in to the Fulton county jail where they had to remain until the judge signed and sent over bond agreements forged by all parties. That proved to overwhelm an overcrowded jail, which Franklin previously told the Guardian is “probably the most mismanaged and dangerous jail in the country”, as five people died there in August alone.
The Atlanta Solidarity Fund – one of nearly 100 similar organizations across the US that raise money to help arrested protesters with bail, legal defense and related needs – said the total cost for paying the bonds of the Rico defendants would reach “hundreds of thousands of dollars”.
Yet the fund’s three members are also targeted in the indictment, after being arrested in their Atlanta home in a Swat-style raid. Their attorney in the Rico case, Don Samuel, is among the most senior of the dozens from the Georgia bar involved in the case, with four decades of criminal law practice and a book to his name on Georgia criminal law.
In a September panel on the case, Samuel outlined Georgia’s increasingly frequent use of the state’s Rico statute in recent years. Originally developed to combat the mafia, Georgia prosecutors are currently wielding the statute against the former president Donald Trump and the rapper Young Thug. But, Samuel noted, unlike those cases, the 109-page indictment involving Cop City filed by the state attorney general, Chris Carr, doesn’t ever make clear who the criminal enterprise is, or what the racketeering acts are.
“It doesn’t allege a single racketeering act,” he told the panel. “Aspects of it are absolutely unintelligible,” he added.
The “overt acts” mentioned in the indictment linked to his clients “deal with various protected activities”, Samuel noted – including “the expenditure of money to help some of the protesters eat – God forbid – or, you know, get bus fare, or to be bailed out of jail”.
The veteran attorney also highlighted how the Dekalb county district attorney has recused herself from the case, and the 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 just about everything you need to know about the genesis of this case,” Samuel said. “It’s coming out of the attorney general’s office because he is trying to become the next governor” of Georgia, “and [current governor Brian] Kemp is supporting him. It’s clearly a politically motivated case.”
