ATLANTA (CN) — Metro Atlanta prosecutor Sherry Boston announced Friday that her office is withdrawing from prosecuting any criminal cases related to the protests over the construction of the controversial new public safety training center.
The Dekalb County District Attorney cited differences in "prosecutorial philosophy," with Georgia's Republican Attorney General Chris Carr.
While the two offices previously had joint jurisdiction over the cases, because state law allows for both state and local prosecutors to pursue indictments in certain offenses, Carr will now have sole oversight.
Since December, over 40 people have been arrested in connection to protests related to to the "Stop Cop City" movement and charged with domestic terrorism, a rarely used state statute that carries a weighty sentence between five and 35 years in prison.
Police reports show the terrorism charges are based on an alleged association with a group called Defend the Atlanta Forest, claiming that the U.S. Department of Homeland Security classified them as “domestic violent extremists."
But Homeland Security officials said earlier this month the agency has no such classification and that the agency doesn't designate any groups as domestic violent extremists. And the FBI, which tracks domestic terrorism threats nationwide, told the Atlanta Journal-Constitution that it cautions against using group affiliations to condemn individual behavior.
Some critics of the police training facility project say there is no organized group, and "Defend the Atlanta Forest" is just a slogan for the movement used by people across many different organizations.
Still, Carr and the Georgia Bureau of Investigations said they are standing by the “domestic violent extremists” justifications used in the arrest warrants.
“It is clear to both myself and to the attorney general that we have fundamentally different prosecution philosophies,” Boston told WABE-FM in an on-air interview with Rose Scott.
According to the GBI, some of those arrested threw rocks and Molotov cocktails toward officers, but for at least nine of them, their alleged acts of domestic terrorism consist solely of misdemeanor trespassing in the woods of the 380 acre unincorporated area proposed for the facility.
At least six others face the same charges, but for property damage that occurred during a night of protest in response to the fatal shooting of 26-year old Manuel Esteban Paez Terán, by an officer while police attempted to remove camped protesters from the site in January.
They were all arrested for allegedly damaging a nearby Atlanta Police Foundation building and setting a police car on fire. But only one defendant was accused of carrying spray paint, a hammer, torch fuel and a lighter as well as kicking and spitting on an officer as they were arrested.
Protesters, civil rights groups and attorneys have questioned the use of such extreme charges against activists, calling it an intimidation attempt.
Boston told WABE that she and the attorney general’s office “had some differences … about who should be charged and what they should be charged with.”
The District Attorney said she had particular concerns with the prosecution of Thomas Jurgens, a Southern Poverty Law Center staff attorney. Jurgens was one of 23 people charged with domestic terrorism on March 5 after several masked demonstrators stormed a construction site and set equipment on fire while throwing projectiles at officers.
However, the arrests weren't made till over an hour later about three-quarters of a mile away, as the demonstrators retreated back to a nearby music festival that was filled with other peaceful activists.
The evidence behind the charges of those arrested at the music festival have been questioned by their defense attorneys, noting errors in the near-identical arrest warrants.
Jurgens was on site as a legal observer, documenting potential violations of protestors’ rights. The Southern Poverty Law Center said the attorney was a victim of “heavy-handed law enforcement intervention against protesters," and his arrest has been condemned by many human rights organizations.
“That was one of the touch points of a number of touch points that ultimately led me to make (this) decision,” Boston said of Jurgens’ arrest. “I will only proceed on cases that I believe that I can make beyond a reasonable doubt.”
Prosecutors have reportedly admitted during bond hearings that they struggled to specifically identify many of the suspects among the crowd of festival goers, though they claim that muddy, wet clothing proved they had gone through the woods and crossed a nearby creek to flee the construction site.
“There’s absolutely been destruction and violence, but how you approach all of these cases needs to be approached individually — every case, individually,” Boston said.
Civil rights organizations have also expressed concerns over the arrest of three organizers of the nonprofit Network for Strong Communities, which distributes free food across the city and runs the Atlanta Solidarity Fund, which raises money to to pay bail and find attorneys for arrested protesters.
Adele MacLean, 42, Marlon Scott Kautz, 39, and Savannah Patterson, 30, were charged with charity fraud and money laundering after police raided their home office in Dekalb County earlier this month. The arrest warrants say that they misled contributors by using collected funds to fund the "violent acts" of "Defend the Atlanta Forest".
A group called the Vote To Stop Cop City Coalition is currently working to gather signatures so that local voters may be able to decide in the November municipal election whether the Atlanta City Council should lease the land to the Atlanta Police Foundation, who is spearheading the project.
The group's referendum petition was approved on Wednesday, and organizers have until Aug. 15 to collect at least 70,330 signatures from Atlanta residents who were registered to vote in the 2021 municipal election. It will then have to be approved by the Atlanta City Council in order to appear on the ballot.
Atlanta's Democratic Mayor Andre Dickens and the Atlanta Police Foundation, who is being backed by an array of corporate donors, say the $90 million facility is needed to replace inadequate training facilities and to retain new police officers and first responders.
But many local residents are unhappy about the $67 million the project will cost the city and it's taxpayers. Opposition to the facility has spurred across the country and even internationally, with critics saying they want to preserve what is one of the urban area's largest remaining green spaces, and also they fear it will perpetuate greater militarization of the police nationally, and exacerbate the over-policing of poor and majority-Black communities.
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