Georgia’s historic racketeering case in connection with opposition to the police training center known as Cop City is still hanging over the heads of 61 defendants, drawing into focus the state’s continuing possession of hundreds of cellphones, laptops and personal items.
The state’s case is believed to be the largest ever leveled against a protest or social movement using Rico, a law created to go after the mafia and usually associated with organized crime but here deployed against a largely environmental and criminal justice-focused movement.
Opposition to the $109m police training 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 have said the center is needed for “world-class” training and to attract new officers.
A Fulton county judge recent missed a deadline on 8 December set by state law, after he failed to put into writing his oral decision from three months earlier, which dismissed the state’s felony criminal conspiracy case on procedural grounds.
Now in its third year, that means the case remains unresolved and the government continues holding on to huge amounts of personal property seized from the 61 defendants, from diaries to cellphones to pants. The situation makes plain the government’s ability to seize property in its effort to prosecute dissent, at a time when the current administration is attempting to label antifa a terrorist group.
The state of affairs is “a natural consequence of the overreach by the state, who cast such a wide net since the beginning”, said Devin Franklin, senior movement policy counsel at the Southern Center for Human Rights, an Atlanta-based organization that obtained attorneys for many of the case’s defendants.
Fulton county superior court judge Kevin Farmer announced his decision to dismiss the charges based on procedural grounds in a September hearing. The decision should have been put in writing within 90 days according to state law – a requirement most judges aren’t able to keep in a county with tens of thousands of felony cases and that is impossible to enforce, several attorneys for the defendants told the Guardian.
The state attorney general, Chris Carr, announced at the time that his office would appeal the decision once it’s in writing. “The attorney general will continue the fight against domestic terrorists and violent criminals who want to destroy life and property,” Carr’s office said in a statement at the time. Carr is running for governor of Georgia in next year’s race.
But as long as the prosecution continues, the state can hold on to an enormous amount of personal possessions seized as evidence.
The most stunning example may come from someone who’s not even a defendant in the case: Manuel Paez Terán, or “Tortuguita”, who state troopers shot and killed in January 2023, while the activist was camping in a forested park near the Cop City site.
Paez Terán’s mother, Belkis, told the Guardian the state continues to hold on to most of Tortuguita’s diary, as well as their cellphone and laptop. Paez Terán “wrote a message” on their cellphone minutes before the troopers shot and killed them, leaving 57 bullet wounds in their body. A state district attorney ruled months later that the killing was “objectively reasonable”, in part because it asserts that Paez Terán shot first. Their last message was “Help”, Belkis said. “I would like to have that [message].”
The state has other items of personal importance to her, like a briefcase she bought for her son in Panama, where she lives – all because the state says these items are needed for their racketeering case.
The state also maintains possession of at least 100 devices – including cellphones and laptops, as well as nine hard drives, 10 USB sticks, three tablets and dozens of boxes containing diaries, health records, bail fund records, letters and many other personal items, the Guardian has learned.
Another noteworthy example of the state’s continuing possession of seized property comes from Marlon Kautz, Savannah Patterson and Adele MacLean, three defendants who make up the Atlanta Solidarity Fund, one of nearly 100 similar organizations across the country that help arrested protesters with bail, legal defense and related needs. The group is at the center of the state’s case; its three members are mentioned more than 120 times in the state’s 2023, 109-page indictment.
The state withdrew money-laundering charges against the fund contained in the Rico indictment in September, 2024, but the racketeering charges remained until Judge Farmer’s September decision. The fund’s three members told the Guardian they were missing such personal items as photos on a cellphone of Patterson’s grandmother, who died while the prosecution has continued, a diary containing a year or two’s worth of “some of [Patterson’s] most intimate thoughts” and a 2016 letter from MacLean to a therapist detailing her feelings about sexuality.
On a practical level, the fund has also been affected by the state’s possession of dozens of receipts needed for the organization to get money returned that was paid for bonds, said Kautz. The fund has had to hire someone to sort out the issue.
The fund also engages in other projects such as corresponding with prisoners from across the south-east US; hundreds of letters from prisoners were also seized and have never been answered. “We were never able to respond,” said Patterson. “It’s heartbreaking.”
Xavier de Janon, attorney for defendant Jamie Marsicano, described trying to sort through the state’s evidence last year. Although nothing of Marsicano’s had been seized, “in a Rico case, all evidence can be used against everyone”, so De Janon went to Carr’s office and spent two, eight-hour days sorting through more than 50 boxes of items.
“There were backpacks, zines, lube, condoms, batteries, IDs, phones, banners, personal papers, letters,” De Janon said. “Tragically, the second day, they brought out the stuff from Tortuguita’s murder: bloody clothes, their diary, backpack and tent – which still smelled like death. I had to step out.”
The sheer amount of digital evidence in the case has been a subject of ongoing controversy, with defense attorneys having to sort through what the deputy attorney general, John Fowler, said at one point was 14 terabytes of evidence – the equivalent of more than 3m photos.
In the digital age, the portion of those terabytes coming from cellphones and computers can be sorted through and copied – and the devices can be returned, several attorneys said. Additionally, the digital information seized from each defendant has been shared with the dozens of defense attorneys via the discovery process – including “statutorily and constitutionally protected health information – a massive invasion of privacy”, said Elizabeth Taxel, a clinical professor at the University of Georgia school of law.
But the state continues to hold on to everything from hard drives to letters. “I don’t know if it’s laziness or intentional, but there is an air of repression” to the state’s handling of the issue, said Lauren Regan, executive director of the Civil Liberties Defense Center, an environmental and social justice legal organization. Regan also represents one of the defendants.
“It’s like: ‘We’ve got you under our thumb,’” she said.
Jason Sheffield, another defense attorney in the case, said the state’s behavior shows “the power of seizure – the power the government has, knowing you will have to fight about it until potentially years later. The misuse of that power is what we all fear.”
