Atlanta Is Transparently Opaque
Honest communication is a problem right now, whether its in court, in City Hall, at the AJC or in the state capitol.
The trial of Young Thug began in earnest last week. I will make a prediction, based on the head-scratching show presented in the early days: this is going to take as long as prosecutors said it would and no one is going to be satisfied with the outcome.
Prosecutors are required to give defendants all of the evidence they intend to use against them in court, with enough time to evaluate that evidence. That really hasn’t been happening.
Police investigators began compiling evidence on this case in January 2015. Young Thug and 27 other defendants started getting arrested in May 2022. He’s been in custody 18 months. And yet, prosecutors were still dropping terabytes of data on defense counsel two weeks before the trial started.
Adriane Love, the assistant district attorney, apparently only started cribbing together her opening statement over the Thanksgiving weekend. Prosecutors agreed to give their slide deck to the defense before presenting it to the jury, so that it could be reviewed for compliance. Love’s deck had more than 50 slides. She sent the defense four of them.
Her opening argument descended into chaos, as one after another defense attorney objected to the contents. Some of the slides contained plain factual errors, in one case misattributing a murder accusation by one defendant to another. Half an hour into the trial, the judge called time-out, sent the jury off and had the lawyers work through the errors.
We’re going through a parade of police witnesses to start. The state’s first witness was Mark Belknap, who is arguably the number one gang investigator in Georgia. Belknap brought his slide deck with him, the deck he shows cops and politicians at state briefings. And prosecutors didn’t share that deck with the defense until the day before he was due to testify, chunks of which had to be excised.
Eighteen months.
The disclosure problems are likely to form the backbone of practical appeals after this case concludes, if anyone is actually convicted. The trial has been a reality television exercise as it stands putting Judge Ural Glanville in a quandary. After eighteen months of motions and jury selection, the case collapsing into a mistrial would be a disaster. But the accumulation of error and misconduct creates conditions for a conviction to be overturned on appeal.
Brian Steel, Jeffery Williams’ attorney, has been playing for an appeal from the start. His case has been argued with a clear eye on overturning elements of Georgia’s broad racketeering statute on constitutional grounds, and on rewriting case law around the use of lyrics and gang charges.
The outcome of this trial is likely to have ripple effects across Georgia’s courtrooms, including Scott McAfee’s courtroom four floors up, where Donald Trump faces racketeering charges.
We are starting to get some visibility on important questions. I have been asking for more than a year now why it took so long to bring a prosecution, given the evidence prosecutors say they have. The answer appears to be that the initial investigation was compromised by a witness fabricating information.
Defense attorneys went through the charges and counts one by one, emphasizing two things: that prosecution witnesses like Kenneth “Lil’ Woody” Copeland are testifying to save their own skin, and that lyrics shouldn’t be used in criminal prosecutions.
Trial lawyers say whatever they can to raise doubts. That doesn’t ever stop being funny. It’s a comedic challenge. Brian Steel argued, straight-faced, that Young Thug named YSL after the luxury brand because of their skinny jeans, that the word “Thug” is an acronym cribbed from Tupac Shakur’s comments — something he has never claimed before in countless interviews — and he shouldn’t be held responsible for illegal weapons and drugs found in his house because he lets a lot of people stay there.
“I am not pro-cocaine,” Brian Steel said of the drugs found at his home at the May 2022 arrest. “It was a little cocaine.”
That, and enough promethazine syrup to stock a CVS and a Glock modified with a switch for automatic fire. Martinez “Lil’ Duke” Arnold was there during the arrest. He took a plea deal and disavowed the gun. I anticipate that he will be compelled to testify about the switch, laying it on Young Thug.
Steel suggests that when Young Thug rented a car for Lil’ Woody, he didn’t know his friend was planning to use it in a hit. And, honestly … that’s plausible. Because who is stupid enough to use a rental car on a hit? On the other hand, Lil’ Duke apparently called Demise McMullen’s phone — which he took with him in the car on the hit —from a recorded phone line in jail minutes after Donovan Thomas was killed, to discuss next steps. Wit.
Aside from scuffing up Lil’ Woody and trying to turn this case into a legal referendum on lyrics, Steel’s argument is that Young Thug wouldn’t have been running a criminal empire because it would have been counterproductive to his musical empire. Basically, Steel told the jury that Jeffery Williams is innocent because he’s rich.
“He is not sitting there telling people to kill people. He doesn't need their money. He's worth tens of millions of dollars,” Steel said.
Prosecutors are making the same argument: that Young Thug’s wealth facilitated gang crime by paying for things like rental cars and guns and lawyers. Of such questions are trials lost and won.
I’m still stewing over an editorial in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution ostensibly penned by Andrew Morse, publisher of the AJC. At no point in the 1,340 word appeal on behalf of the Atlanta Public Safety Training Center — Cop City — did he disclose that Cox Communications, which owns his paper and pays his salary, has contributed $10 million to Cop City’s construction and is the largest financial supporter of the project.
And they call me an activist journalist.
“Former Mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms, current Mayor Andre Dickens and Atlanta Police Foundation President and CEO Dave Wilkinson share the blame for a process that has, at times, lacked transparency, clear communication and accountability.”
At times? The Atlanta Police Foundation continues to regularly refuse to answer direct questions from the press, including the AJC’s own reporters, about how it intends to operate the training center, how the project is funded and with whom it will contract. Requests for information are referred to the police department, as though the cops work for APF and not the other way around.
And now my friend Timothy Pratt at The Guardian dropped a bombshell story: that police officials and government leaders have resorted to using the Signal app to evade disclosure requirements under the Georgia Open Records Act.
Note that the AJC didn’t break this story.
A community member sent the Guardian 13 emails detailing the Atlanta police department’s conduct. The Atlanta Community Press Collective, a local outlet covering “Cop City” and other issues, saw the original open-records request and confirmed the authenticity of the emails – which also contain phone numbers of various officials, all of whom the Guardian separately confirmed are on the app.
One – Capt Tommy Atzert – has Signal on a phone he describes in an email as his “personal cell” – but does not have the app on another he labels a “city phone”.
I must remind you all that the city of Atlanta — and in particular its police department — has a history of evading public scrutiny.
In 2012, Atlanta entered into a federal consent order mandating that its police officers refrain from interfering with the public’s photography or videography of their activities. Three years later, a federal judge sanctioned the city, because it had blown off the order.
I was one of dozens of journalists who were forced to pore through millions of pages of printed documents in 2017 when former mayor Kasim Reed pulled a “transparency” publicity stunt while responding to an open records act request related to a bribery scandal.
Exactly one person in Georgia history has ever been criminally charged with violating the Georgia Open Records Act. That’s Jenna Garland, Kasim Reed's former press secretary in Atlanta. She was convicted and fined in 2019.
When journalists went after body camera video to see who was firing tear gas at protesters in the 2020 demonstrations, the response was to try to charge thousands of dollars for the privilege. This is typical.
The city uses an exemption to open meetings act rules to hold “advisory panels” discussing, among other things, public safety strategies.
Atlanta has an “Office of Transparency” now. I have asked them for an explanation of the Signal use among city staff.
I know I sound like a policy crank here. But the whole point of trying to build the Atlanta Public Safety Training Center in DeKalb County, and running it through the Atlanta Police Foundation, was to avoid the bruising process of neighborhood planning unit meetings, to sidestep an established public process.
The Atlanta Police Foundation is not subject to open meetings or open records rules. The city has incrementally offloaded police administrative and logistics functions onto APF without any real way for the public to see what they're doing. Housing subsidies, youth outreach centers and Crimestoppers are run by APF, not the city. Atlanta’s repeat offender research — a program that creates a high-priority target list for police investigations — is run by APF, which means there’s no way to see who is on that list, how APD uses that list or what detailed criteria APF uses to determine who goes on that list.
I’m going to ask the city council if it intends to pursue a local ordinance banning the use of Signal and similar applications when communicating about public business.
Contrast that with Atlanta City Councilman Antonio Lewis’ proposed legislation to ban wearing face masks that conceal identity, which is a walk-back from mask-friendly pandemic rules. Georgia has a 70-year-old state law which ban wearing masks in public, created to fight the Ku Klux Klan. Kemp ordered that law to be put into abeyance during the pandemic.
Lewis voted against funding Cop City. But his proposed ordinance would plainly be used to identify street protesters in the future. Atlanta is the most surveilled city in the United States, with a network of more than 15,000 government and privately-owned cameras covering (the wealthier) parts of the city.
The camera network is not managed by the city. It is managed by the Atlanta Police Foundation.
Two weeks ago, APD released video from the body-worn camera of the officer who Tazered Johnny Hollman to death in August. I pulled that video from the Fulton County District Attorney’s Office the day it came out, and watched it immediately. (You can find my Twitter stream of that here.)
The video was released the day before Thanksgiving. People put out bad news on Christmas Eve, July 3 and Thanksgiving week to bury it. And it seems to have worked, because the video is horrifying.
In the moments before his death, Hollman, a deacon, is praying for his life. He’s telling the cop he can’t breathe. And the overweight 62-year-old is plainly trying to comply with the younger, fitter cop in the moments before he dies.
Hollman’s family is suing the tow truck driver in the video, Eric Robinson, who is shown helping restrain Hollman as he lay unconscious after being Tazed.
Officer Kiran Kimbrough hasn’t been charged. I don’t expect him to be.
The argument Atlanta attorneys will make has a long precedent in Georgia law: Kimbrough was using less-than-lethal force and Hollman’s death couldn’t have been predicted by a cop with a Tazer. Kimbrough claims Hollman fought him before being taken down, justifying the Tazer use. The question about whether a police officer should be arresting anyone for choosing not to sign a traffic citation at an accident will be viewed as legally irrelevant.
As a policy question though, the city should be having a serious discussion about it.
State lawmakers in Georgia are meeting today to “debate” new district maps for legislative and congressional districts. Debate is a strong word, because the maps drawn by Republicans appear to be a done deal, with no input required or desired from Democrats.
The substantive argument will be between the lawyers for the Republican Party and the Georgia ACLU in front of US district judge Steve Jones. Everything else is whining for political effect.
Jones ordered Georgia to redraw its legislative maps in a 516-page order last month after finding that Georgia’s maps unfairly discriminated against Black voters.
The legal standard requires districts that allows Black voters proportional to their numbers a fair shot to elect the candidate of their preference. That doesn’t necessarily mean a Democrat, it doesn’t necessarily mean a Black candidate, and it doesn’t require a guaranteed win.
Jones ordered maps that add five more Black-influenced house districts, two more in the Senate and one more congressional district. Republicans appear to have done that.
Mostly. Sort of.
The new state House and Senate maps draw Black voters into new districts by forcing Democratic white and Asian legislators to run against one another, making the map an electoral wash. It is partisan gerrymandering — which is legal — without being racial gerrymandering, which violates the Voting Rights Act.
The congressional map is a bigger reach, because it cracks Gwinnett into four pieces, likely violating the order. Gwinnett County is a Benneton ad with no racial majority, but nonwhite voters generally vote as a group to elect Democrats, like Lucy McBath.
One tragedy here is how thoroughly the Republican Party has abandoned the prospect of appealing to nonwhite voters to change their political fortunes. If Black voters were as likely to vote for a Republican as a Democrat, there would be no political advantage to gerrymandering around them. The new maps treat Latino and Asian voters the same way, even though Republican have been making inroads. The Voting Rights Act requires plaintiffs to prove a minority group votes as a bloc. No bloc, no suit.
A redistricting committee chairman looked me in the eye last week and said he didn’t want Georgia to look like Alabama when this is over. Right now, I’ve got to wonder about that.
The congressional map looks like a dilatory move. They’ve put a map up that they can argue complies with the order, if you squint just right and hold it at an angle. If the map gets thrown out, the state will appeal. And if Republicans play for enough time, the court’s rulings won’t land until after the primaries, preserving one net Republican congressional seat for two years. Republicans lose nothing in the attempt.
Another tragedy that goes unspoken: Republicans can only draw maps around communities of color when there are distinct communities of color to draw a map around. It’s 2023, and a U.S. Census dot map still shows bright lines dividing communities by race. This is the legacy of housing discrimination baked into zoning laws, coupled with deep continuing discrimination in housing and in jobs. Black people are more likely to be poor, and poor communities are more likely to be Black.
Our policies perpetuate segregation. I would argue that conservative policies, today, are utterly centered on maintaining segregation like this, for the purposes of drawing maps like those coming out of committee this week. As long as conservatives can’t figure out how to make an effective political argument appealing to nonwhite voters without losing more votes from white racists, a fully-integrated society works against Republican electoral interests.
Couple of notes:
I sat for an interview with Maina Mwaura at Good Faith Media, a religious news outfit, to talk about the 2020 election, religion's role in politics, and the importance of journalism. I’m an atheist, and rarely discuss matters of religion, but this was a rip-roaring good time on the other side of the microphone, fielding good faith questions.
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Nikema Williams was one of two Democrats to vote against expelling George Santos, which I find fascinating. Some people are mad at her. I’m hoping for a sit-down conversation about it. She’s apparently staking out a philosophical position on the primacy of voters deciding who serves and who doesn’t, the better to challenge laws that obstruct voting rights later.
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I requested video from an Axon body-worn camera of the Fulton County sheriff's office engaging in a shakedown raid of the jail a few months ago, after reading a jail report about Christian Eppinger — one of the YSL defendants — fighting with deputies and being forcibly taken down. The sheriff’s office granted access to that video … and then rescinded it at the last moment.
They cited O.C.G.A. § 50-18-72(a)(25)(iii) which exempts “[r]ecords the disclosure of which would compromise security against sabotage or criminal or terrorist acts and the nondisclosure of which is necessary for the protection of life, safety, or public property, which shall be limited to the following . . . [a]ny document relating to the existence, nature, location, or function of security devices designed to protect against terrorist or other attacks that depend for their effectiveness in whole or in part upon a lack of general public knowledge.”
I don’t need the actual video. I needed the audio. For the podcast. Still no. I’ve gone to the Attorney General’s office in Georgia for mediation.
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Speaking of which, the final two episodes of King Slime are coming out. The first, about Gunna, dropped yesterday. The second, about YSL’s days in jail and the horrors of Rice Street, hits next week.
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U.S. Rep. Hank Johnson gave me a nifty “Unsung Heroes” award a couple of weeks ago. Honestly, I’m feeling pretty sung at this point, but thank you. Don’t screw up and make this awkward.
Great. Love the reporting. My lawyer friends and I all follow and discuss. We're mostly in Athens. The episode on the Fulton Co. Jail was jaw dropping. I *knew* it was terrible but I was still blown away. Great work by you and the team.
Why only two more episodes of King Slime? Great podcast and the trial is just getting going...