[Pnews] 61 ‘Stop Cop City’ Activists Hit With RICO Charges

[Prisoner News]

thedailybeast.com
<https://www.thedailybeast.com/stop-cop-city-activists-hit-with-rico-charges-by-same-georgia-grand-jury-that-indicted-trump>
‘Stop Cop City’ Activists Hit With RICO Charges By Same Georgia Grand Jury
That Indicted Trump
Kelly Weill - September 5, 2023
------------------------------

Georgia prosecutors have filed racketeering charges against 61 people
accused of involvement with “Stop Cop City
<https://www.thedailybeast.com/atlantas-cop-city-blasted-at-public-meeting-over-dollar335-million-in-funding>,”
a protest movement against a controversial Atlanta police training facility
<https://www.thedailybeast.com/atlantas-cop-city-will-become-a-reality-despite-pushback>
.

The charges were filed last week, according to online court records.
Charging documents were not immediately available on Tuesday morning. But
the list of defendants suggests that the case implicates people who have
already been arrested on tenuous evidence, like a legal observer
<https://www.thedailybeast.com/legal-observer-hit-with-terrorism-charges-after-mass-cop-city-arrests>
who was jailed while monitoring protests, activists who ran a bail fund
<https://theappeal.org/cop-city-bail-fund-arrests-atlanta-solidarity-fund/>for
other defendants, and a trio of activists arrested while handing out fliers
<https://theintercept.com/2023/05/02/cop-city-activists-arrest-flyers/>
with the name of a cop who killed a fellow protester.

The Cop City Vote Coalition, a group that gathered more than 100,000
signatures to put the facility's construction up for a vote this year,
condemned the charges as "authoritarian" measures by Georgia Attorney
General Chris Carr. The group also noted that charging documents describe
the alleged racketeering scheme as beginning before the police training
facility was even announced.

"Further, the documents use the day George Floyd was murdered as the date
the alleged criminal acts began," the group said in a statement. "This is
months before anyone was even aware of Cop City, and is a clear assault on
the broader movement for racial justice and equity. Carr’s actions are a
part of a retaliatory pattern of prosecutions against organizers nationwide
that attack the right to protest and freedom of speech."

The RICO charges come as Georgia’s RICO statute receives national
attention. Donald Trump
<https://www.thedailybeast.com/the-5-most-surprising-takeaways-from-donald-trumps-fourth-indictment-in-georgia>
and a collection of his associates
<https://www.thedailybeast.com/everyone-indicted-with-donald-trump-in-georgia-from-rudy-giuliani-to-mark-meadows>
were charged under the state’s severe RICO statute last month. A person
convicted on RICO charges in Georgia cannot be pardoned by the governor.
Only the Georgia State Board of Pardons and Paroles can issue RICO pardons
in the state, and even then, only after a person has served five years of
their sentence.

The same grand jury that indicted Trump on RICO charges also indicted the
Stop Cop City defendants, the *Atlanta Journal-Constitution* reported on
Tuesday <https://twitter.com/bluestein/status/1699077628257558721>.

In September 2021, Atlanta approved plans to build a police training
facility (dubbed “Cop City” by opponents) in the city’s South River Forest.
The plans were controversial; approximately 70 percent of locals
<https://www.newyorker.com/news/letter-from-the-south/the-new-fight-over-an-old-forest-in-atlanta>
who weighed in during a public comment session opposed the facility, citing
its cost (more than $90 million), its environmental impact, and its
potential effect on overpolicing in Atlanta.

When the city moved ahead with plans for construction, activists protested
on the proposed construction site. Police shot and killed one, Manuel
“Tortuguita” Esteban Paez Terán, in January, when they accused Terán of
firing a gun. Subsequent autopsies
<https://www.thedailybeast.com/autopsy-casts-new-doubts-in-police-killing-of-atlanta-activist-tortuguita>
have
cast doubt
<https://www.thedailybeast.com/cop-city-protester-manuel-teran-had-his-hands-up-when-police-fatally-shot-him-autopsy-reveals>
on those claims. Soon after Terán’s killing, police charged 19 more “Stop
Cop City” activists with terrorism, despite many being accused of nothing
more than misdemeanor trespassing
<https://grist.org/protest/atlanta-cop-city-terrorism/> around the proposed
construction site.

In a later crackdown, police conducted mass arrests
<https://www.thedailybeast.com/legal-observer-hit-with-terrorism-charges-after-mass-cop-city-arrests>
at a Stop Cop City music festival, accusing some people of engaging in
property damage at a nearby protest, on the questionable basis of those
people allegedly having mud on their shoes
<https://theintercept.com/2023/03/08/atlanta-cop-city-protesters/>. (The
music festival was held in a forest.)

“They were doing things like snatching and grabbing people indiscriminately
and they ended up grabbing several legal observers who were there doing a
protected job, which is to monitor protests,” one music festival
attendee previously
told The Daily Beast
<https://www.thedailybeast.com/legal-observer-hit-with-terrorism-charges-after-mass-cop-city-arrests>
.

One of those legal observers was an attorney with the Southern Poverty Law
Center and the National Lawyers Guild. Footage appears to show Thomas
Jurgens being arrested while wearing one of the neon green hats that
identifies NLG legal observers. (Neither the SPLC nor the NLG immediately
returned requests for comment.)

Jurgens’ case was one of several that led DeKalb County District Attorney
Sherry Boston to withdraw her office from 42 Stop Cop City cases. Boston
objected to charging Jurgens, but was overruled by Georgia Attorney General
Chris Carr, the *Intercept* reported this summer
<https://theintercept.com/2023/06/21/cop-city-georgia-attorney-general-domestic-terrorism/>
.

“We had some differences — when I say we, I mean myself and the attorney
general’s office — about who should be charged and what they should be
charged with,” Boston told WABE in June
<https://www.wabe.org/breaking-dekalb-da-withdraws-from-all-cases-against-cop-city-protesters-state-ag-charges-still-stand/>
.

She added that Jurgens’ case “was one of the touch points of a number of
touch points that ultimately led me to make the decision that I have made
here now,” she said. “The value set of our office is that I will only
proceed on cases that I believe I can make beyond a reasonable doubt.”

Also named in the RICO charges are a trio of activists who were arrested
for distributing fliers this year with the names of the police officers
allegedly involved in Terán’s killing, according to the Atlanta Community
Press Collective
<https://twitter.com/atlanta_press/status/1699062221501006260>. They
were previously
charged
<https://theintercept.com/2023/05/02/cop-city-activists-arrest-flyers/>
with felony intimidation of an officer and misdemeanor stalking for the
flier campaign.

“They were doing things like snatching and grabbing people indiscriminately
and they ended up grabbing several legal observers.”

The RICO charges also name three activists who were arrested this summer
and charged with money laundering and charity fraud connected to their work
running a bail fund that supported Stop Cop City defendants. Prosecutors
allege
<https://theintercept.com/2023/05/31/cop-city-bail-fund-protest-raid-atlanta>
that the trio committed felonies by spending some of the fund’s money on
things “gasoline, forest clean-up, totes, covid rapid tests, media, yard
signs and other miscellaneous expenses.”

Even where some defendants are accused of property damage at the proposed
construction site, civil rights organizations have previously condemned the
terrorism charges as a step too far.

Enacted after a white supremacist shooting in 2017, Georgia’s terrorism law
is a broadly written statute that allows people to face terror charges for
damaging property—not just hurting people. Responding to the previous
terrorism charges against Stop Cop City protesters, the American Civil
Liberties Union
<https://www.aclu.org/news/national-security/how-officials-in-georgia-are-suppressing-political-protest-as-domestic-terrorism>
decried the new law as “overbroad” legislation that “can be wielded to
disproportionately punish people who express political beliefs.”

“These prosecutions exemplify a highly problematic trend of both the
federal and state government: using domestic terrorism powers to punish
dissent,” the ACLU said.
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