The Alarming New Criminal Case That Endangers Political Activists

Last week, the Fulton County grand jury that indicted Donald Trump, Rudy Giuliani, and 17 other co-defendants under Georgia’s RICO statutes wielded the same anti-mob laws against a very different group: 61 protesters who camped out for months in an Atlanta forest to protest the construction of a massive police training facility.

The protesters’ concerns were about both environmental harm and the militarization of the police. Large swaths of the Weelaunee Forest are set to be razed for the $90 million, 85-acre police center—which will include amenities like a nightclub, a mock city for large-scale training, shooting ranges, and a Black Hawk helipad—for a police force that already commands a quarter-billion-dollar budget. The hundreds of people who have, since 2021, come to the forest at various times to block the construction of “Cop City,” as the facility has been dubbed, have been met with increasingly brutal state force, both at the ground level and in the halls of justice.

But the RICO move, which charges protesters with an organized criminal conspiracy, makes for an especially troubling development—one with dire implications for the future of protest and free expression in the United States.

In early 2021, then–Mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms announced that Atlanta would build a new “public safety training facility” so that local cops and firefighters could get “top-notch” training; soon after, the city’s Police Foundation proposed that this center be established within the South Forest River—often deemed “Atlanta’s last forest”—utilizing parcels of land that had been explicitly designated for use as public parks. Activists concerned about the forest and the center began mobilizing online, establishing new Instagram accounts like @DefendAtlantaForest and @StopCopCity. Hundreds of Atlanta residents registered their disapproval in about 17 hours of public comments, but the City Council pushed legislation through anyway.

Forest defenders started putting up hammocks and temporary shelters in the woods. Teach-ins, community events, walks, and musical performances in the forest followed, the bulk of which proceeded peacefully; when cops attempted to force out the campers in May 2022, some threw rocks in retaliation, spurring the first round of protest-related arrests. The Atlanta police also alleged that the seven arrestees threw a Molotov cocktail, despite flimsy evidence. By the end of 2022, authorities were using even more force, arresting and charging five protesters with domestic terrorism and clearing out park areas for construction.

Since then, law enforcement officers have deployed more brutal tactics. An activist was killed by police firing 57 bullets into their body. They have raided camps and charged over 30 people, many of them out-of-towners, for “property crimes” under Georgia’s domestic terrorism law (even though, as the Associated Press reported, none of the warrants accused any of the arrestees of vandalism). And, clad in riot gear, police have detained members of a local nonprofit who were helping activists with steep bail costs, slapping three workers with felony charges of charity fraud and money laundering.

As Brooklyn Law School professor Jocelyn Simonson wrote in Slate in June: “Georgia officials are not hiding the underlying theory of these prosecutions: that to be part of a group supporting protesters is, itself, a crime.” The same logic applies to the protesters charged with domestic terrorism. As the American Civil Liberties Union wrote at the time:

The ACLU acknowledged that during otherwise peaceful protests, “a small group of individuals might throw objects or engage in vandalism.” But, the organization warned, “law-abiding protesters in the vicinity risk being mistakenly (or carelessly) accused of participating in those actions—and being charged not just with a minor property crime, but with terrorism and a potential 35-year prison sentence.”

In early June, a DeKalb County judge granted bond to the nonprofit fund organizers, plainly stating that the money laundering case against them was not only weak, but rather trumped-up. (“There’s not a lot of meat on the bones,” the judge said of the case.) It’s worth noting that the warrants against the nonprofit members, as well as those taken out against the activists charged with domestic terrorism, all declared that Defend the Atlanta Forest—the name given to the loose coalition of activists protesting the police facility—had been “classified by the United States Department of Homeland Security as Domestic Violent Extremists.” But, as the journalist Spencer Ackerman reported in his Forever Wars newsletter, the DHS informed him that it “does not classify or designate any groups as domestic violent extremists.”

Despite the fact that these prior charges were deemed legally and factually dubious, the new RICO charges in the Fulton County Superior Court double down. Georgia Attorney General Chris Carr insisted that “the individuals who have been charged are charged with violent acts.” But his indictment doesn’t have much meat on the bones, so to speak. The aggressive acts named in the charges are related to property damage, protesters naming private equity executives who are publicly known to be financing the construction of Cop City, and the punching of one law enforcement officer.

It’s galling to see environmental and anti–police brutality activists charged with crimes far more serious than their documented actions—and prosecuted on the same level as political actors who attempted to overturn an entire presidential election. Whether you agree or disagree with the anti–Cop City movement and its methods, the fact remains that its scattered, ideologically diverse coalitions of dissidents have exercised every protest right afforded to them: They’ve petitioned the halls of power and continue to do so to this day, only to be spurned at every corner by officials ostensibly elected to serve their interests; they’ve utilized the digital commons to broadcast their message through myriad channels; they’ve exercised their First Amendment rights to show up and speak out at the facility’s proposed sites, and they’ve made use of public space that was designated for the people. Many Atlantans oppose the training center and this treatment of the protesters, and yet the city presses on—not exactly the work of a vibrant democratic structure.

Worse, perhaps, than the criminalization of forms of speech, and reclassification of it as criminal conspiracy, are the glaring inaccuracies in the charges against protesters.

As law professor Simonson noted in another recent Slate piece, the indictment “says that the forest land ‘is owned by Atlanta Police foundation and leased by the City of Atlanta,’ when in fact the reverse is true.” The case accuses Defend the Atlanta Forest of “promoting virulent anarchist ideals” in its resistance to police center construction, including “collectivism, mutualism/mutual aid, and social solidarity.” After framing these long-standing social concepts as nefarious schemes, the prosecutors characterize organizers’ offers of “solidarity” and “mutual” aid to forest protesters as part of a grander conspiracy to indoctrinate sympathetic observers, instead of long-established frameworks for collective care. The indictment also repeats the lie that the protesters have been “classified” as domestic terrorists by the federal DHS. And even though the attorneys general accurately note that the protesters do not have a “history of working together as group in single location,” and highlight the decentralized nature of protest groups of this kind, they nevertheless baselessly claim that the entire movement has coalesced into a singular “anti-government, anti-police, and anti-corporate extremist organization.”

This is quite the dramatic way to recharacterize a leaderless movement that started in 2021 through various social media accounts. The indictment equates the activists’ goal of “protection of the environment at all costs” to reflexive ecoterrorism, claiming that the activist who was killed precipitated their death by shooting at cops—even though a DeKalb County autopsy revealed that the activist was seated, with their hands raised, when the police shot and killed them.

The stunning misrepresentation also extends to the nonprofit that stepped in to help activists, leading to a series of horrific charges. Dozens of people are said to have committed “overt act[s] in furtherance of the conspiracy” for merely transferring and receiving money for the forest-protest efforts. The three nonprofit members booked for money laundering are also held responsible for every single forest-themed article that appeared on a movement-related blog that, as even the indictment notes, literally anyone could write for. Other activities charged as furthering “the conspiracy”: showing up at an Atlanta Police Department recruiting table, possessing a planning document known as a “Security Handbook,” posting flyers, driving to a planned rally, signing one’s name as “ACAB” (which stands for “All Cops Are Bastards”), filming a police interaction on a cellphone, occupying treehouses, and “possessing” items like phone chargers, food, camouflage, climbing equipment, and medication. The sheer number of these types of acts—when compared with the actual property damage and the few instances of alleged physical attack—betray the absurdity of this entire enterprise.

This is far from the only time Fulton County and Georgia criminal justice systems have used such eye-popping tactics to persecute freedom of expression. Last year, in a case that made waves among music fans, the Fulton Superior Court registered a RICO case from the state of Georgia against members and affiliates of the famed Young Stoner Life collective—some of them signees of the Warner Music Group–owned label YSL Records—accusing members of this longtime Atlanta rap collective of acting as a “criminal street gang” named Young Slime Life, pointing mainly to various terms and emojis as “gang” identifiers. This accusation appeared in prior lawsuits against the group’s and label’s co-founder, celebrity rapper Young Thug, none of which amounted to any convictions in that regard.

The case does carry some serious charges for certain YSL members, including murder and armed robbery, but notably, none of those charges apply to Thug. Instead, the rapper was charged with conspiring to violate RICO statutes and participating in gang activity—all based only on song lyrics and Instagram posts where Thug and his friends are wearing YSL gear. Seriously. Hallmarks of Thug’s distinctive performing style, such as his puns and rap references, are showcased here as “overt act[s] in furtherance of a conspiracy.” They include lyrics like “Fuck, fuck the police (fuck ’em), in high speed,” “ready for war like I’m Russia,” “I get all type of cash, I’m general,” and “dissect your body like science class.” A few of the defendants have accepted plea deals that forced them to declare that YSL is a gang—even though they’ve maintained their innocence, and likely took those deals because they would’ve otherwise languished in Fulton County’s dangerous and sometimes fatal jail conditions.

Never mind that the federal judiciary, up through the Supreme Court, has previously ruled in favor of bawdy and explicit rap music as creative and protected expression; never mind that bipartisan legislation restricting the use of rap lyrics in criminal trials has passed in California and is also being considered in New York, the U.S. House of Representatives, and even Atlanta’s own City Council. The case is being pursued by Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis, who also recently indicted Trump. (She’s long been fond of slinging RICO charges at unconventional groups, including Atlanta public school educators convicted of inflating student scores.)

The message from the YSL and Cop City indictments is clear: If you form a crew of any kind, and if you affiliate with a distinct brand or protest movement and the law decides your group is actually a gang, then every single bit of expression can be criminalized on the same level as anti-democratic insurrectionists.

Although Fani Willis is not bringing the RICO case against the Cop City activists, that case and the YSL prosecution are being litigated in her county court—and the Cop City indictment was handed down by the same grand jury who decided Trump and his co-defendants’ RICO charges. Ironic, then, that the same state courtroom that’s prosecuting the undermining of democratic norms is also trying to snuff out one of our most important democratic principles: free expression, whether it manifests in the form of a slogan or a song.