Prosecutors' 'Cop City' case collapses as judge tosses Rico conspiracy charges

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https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/sep/13/cop-city-case-georgia-prosecutors

Prosecutors’ ‘Cop City’ case collapses as judge tosses Rico conspiracy charges

Two-year attempt to prosecute opponents of police training center on criminal conspiracy charges ends in failure

Timothy Pratt in Atlanta
Sat 13 Sep 2025 11.00 EDT

Georgia prosecutors are facing what one expert called “probably the highest-profile failure of using conspiracy charges to indict a protest movement” in US history, after a two-year attempt to prosecute a criminal conspiracy in connection with opposition to the police training center known as Cop City.

Fulton county superior court Judge Kevin Farmer announced his decision to dismiss charges against the case’s 61 defendants during hearings this week on a handful of defense attorney motions.

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The decision shows “what critics said all along – that the state of Georgia was in such a rush and panic to stop the ‘Stop Cop City’ movement that they violated their own rules,” said social movement historian Dan Berger. “They acted inappropriately and without justification, to bring what seemed from the beginning as dramatically overblown and patently absurd charges.”

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Will Potter, author of the recently released Little Red Barns, a decade-long investigation of factory farms and fascism, said the lessons of the case could be important under Trump’s second term, which has seen the US slide towards authoritarianism.

“The playbook–stretching laws like Rico to cast dissent as organized crime won’t vanish, especially amid a surge of authoritarian and openly fascist politics,” Potter said.

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