Young Thug's Attorney Arrested

I am in blood / Stepped in so far that should I wade no more, / Returning were as tedious as go o'er

The quote is from Shakespeare’s Macbeth. It is the sunk cost fallacy, manifested in iambic tragedy, as are we all who endure the continuation of the Young Thug trial, including first and foremost Ural Glanville, chief justice of the Fulton County Superior Court, who perhaps realized today the inevitability of collapse.

This afternoon, Glanville jailed Brian Steel, the lauded attorney representing Jeffery “Young Thug” Williams in the YSL gang and racketeering case, for refusing to disclose how he discovered that Glanville had held what certainly seems to be an illegal ex parte meeting with the prosecution, the state’s star witness Kenneth “Lil’ Woody” Copeland and Copeland’s attorney without any defense counsel present.

This comes after Lil’ Woody pleaded the Fifth from the stand on Friday, which is also a legal no-no if the prosecution knows it’s coming.

Court is not supposed to be this dramatic. Seriously. Stop watching Law and Order.

Before we get into today’s madness, I’d like to discuss what happened in court when Kenneth Copeland took the stand Friday. If this trial is a drama, you wouldn’t build the story around Young Thug. You would build it around Lil’ Woody. Copeland is the quasi-everyman surrounded by forces larger than himself, whose life circumstances and bad decisions have led to extraordinary turmoil for everyone around him. He’s a survivor of chaos of his own making, though you might wonder how.

Copeland grew up at the absolute bottom, starting in Mechanicsville when Mechanicsville was the boogeyman parents used to scare their children into staying out of trouble. Fatherless as a child and intermittently housed, Copeland connected with Williams and others on the street, according to court records. Police describe him as bullet repellent — he’s been shot at dozens of times without injury. He has been in and out of prison most of his adult life, the last time on a federal weapons charge connected to the gang war he helped precipitate.

After being robbed by a YFN gang member at Club Crucial in January 2015, Copeland ostensibly approached Young Thug and asked him to rent a car — the car that was ultimately used in the drive by that killed Donovan “Nut” Thomas and started the street war. Woody is the one who can connect Young Thug to the murder, the one who could say definitively if Williams knew it would be used on a hit.

Woody was famously captured on a leaked interrogation tape from his 2021 arrest on a weapons charge, begging for a way to talk the cops out of sending him back to jail. It’s clear today that he’s been quietly talking to the police for the better part of a decade, which may be why the charges from that 2021 arrest were dropped. In court, Woody’s attorney said the cops have been talking to him for nearly two years, even as Young Thug has been cooling in a jail cell.

Needless to say, an awful lot of people want Kenneth Copeland dead.

Woody is kind of screwed no matter what he does. The DA offered an immunity deal for his testimony, but that doesn’t preclude the feds from charging him with the federal crime of being a felon in possession of a firearm. (Normally, they would probably honor the local deal, but nothing is normal here.) The deal means he can’t plead the Fifth, because he can’t incriminate himself with his testimony.

And yet, that’s just what he did Friday, in front of the jury, which is why Judge Ural Glanville curtly sent him off to jail for a weekend on Rice Street.

Defense counsel flipped out.

You see, unlike the movies and TV, courts are not supposed to let people tell a jury that they are pleading the Fifth. That revelation is supposed to be made without a jury present, because the witness is telegraphing that they’ve done something so bad that they’re afraid they’ll go to jail if they talk about it in court, which tends to make people think you’re a criminal when you do so.

If a witness is going to plead the Fifth, and a lawyer knows that, they’re not suppose to call the witness to the stand, to avoid that scenario.

Steel called for a mistrial. But before he could even get the words out, Glanville told him that the prosecution couldn’t have known that Woody would do that, since the last thing he said in court — after some surly resistance — was that he was going to testify.

And I have to call bullshit on that. Glanville knew there was a reasonable basis for the prosecution to know Woody would pull that stunt. Because I knew, and I told him.

Five minutes before Copeland took the stand and was summarily carted to jail, two sheriff’s deputies pulled me, the video camera operator from Law & Crime and Sylvia Tumusiime out of court to tell us not to record an arrest if they had to cuff him in court. I protested, and the deputy said the instruction came from Glanville … and that the judge would put it on the record if I asked him to.

Which I did. I called his staff attorney over and told him that the deputy’s instruction was in conflict with my Rule 22 order, which — after a court hearing that cost me some money — explicitly allows me to take pictures of everything except the jury in court. I asked for the instruction to be placed into the record, and he agreed.

I saw him talk to Glanville moments after our conversation. Glanville did not, however, put the order into the record. He let Woody take the stand, beclown himself and get swept into jail by a bailiff.

Keep in mind that inmates have dug holes through the walls of the Fulton County Jail not to escape, but to shank someone else. The jail is insanely dangerous, and Woody has told police before that he doesn’t believe he can be protected there.

If Glanville were being reasonable, he would have taken the question of the prosecution’s foreknowledge seriously. Instead, he was poised to immediately sweep the issue aside and march on with the trial.

Seeing that happen in real time has fundamentally changed my view of this trial.

Monday, Lil’ Woody was back in court, but the 9:30 start time ended up being more like 11 a.m. That’s not especially unusual in this trial. But Copeland had relented and was testifying. He was being a squirrelly lunatic mess on the stand, treating direct answers like bollards on a suicidal skateboard run, but he was testifying.

He had been given a talking-to.

After the lunch break, Brian Steel confronted Judge Ural Glanville about the ex parte meeting and suggested “on information and belief” that Kenneth Copeland had been threatened with jail if he did not testify. Glanville’s reaction was not to deny the meeting happened, but to become increasingly incensed about Steel discovering that it had occurred.

Now, I’m not a lawyer. I am a simple man of the written word. I have had no fancy schooling in the finer points of legal conduct (aside from some graduate study in an MBA program on business law.) But I can read the one-page rules for ex parte contact and they’re not complicated.

Don’t do it. If you do do it, you have to disclose it immediately.

The legal principle here is pretty basic. The prosecution and the defense are entitled to the same information. Prosecutors can't keep secrets, particularly after a jury has been empaneled. It's why discovery exists: the DA has to tell the defense what it's going to use.

An ex parte meeting like this, according to legal experts weighing in as the livestream unfolded, mouths agape at the audacity of it, is not just grounds for reversible error; it’s shockingly, Judicial Qualifications Commission hearing-level impropriety. It is potentially career ending conduct.

And Glanville just jailed Steel for asking about it.

Well, he actually jailed Steel for withholding the source of the information, which is interesting, because Glanville seemed to be able to guess at who that probably was: Woody’s attorney. No one else would have had the motivation.

Ashleigh Merchant, famous now for filing the brief revealing Fani Willis’ improper relationship with special prosecutor Nathan Wade, marched into court with about 50 other defense attorneys in the gallery behind her to defend Steel in the contempt hearing. It appears that every defense attorney in the entire courthouse emptied into room 1B, filling the hallways and the seats, to bear witness.

Glanville appears to have wanted to jail Steel indefinitely on both civil and criminal contempt at once, something Merchant explained was impossible. Either Steel was entitled to a full hearing, calling witnesses and the rest, or it was a civil matter. After a characteristically long break, Glanville ordered Steel jailed for 20 days, one weekend at a time.

Steel asked to be jailed with Young Thug so they could work on the defense together. Glanville agreed.

The jailing was theater: the first appeals court that sees this will set it aside.

My question is what the hell was so important for Glanville to hear that he would stake an inevitable appeal against it. The only thing I can think that it could be would have something to do with witness protection for Copeland. As much as I like Brian Steel, there have been … issues … with information security during this trial. Never mind the multiple hacks of Zoom software, leaks of discovery and the major hack of the court computers earlier this year; more than one defense attorney has faced discipline for defendants using their computers. The premise of holding all of these people in jail while this trial is going on has been because of a supposed propensity to intimidate witnesses.

Glanville seems to think that an examination of the transcript of the meeting will make it clear that he didn’t need to disclose it … but he’s also unwilling to release the transcript, even though Lil’ Woody is still on the stand and faces imminent cross-examination.

“I’ll let that be an issue for the appeals court,” Glanville said over and over.

Friends. I think Glanville has decided that the case is fucked and there’s nothing he can do about it at this point. He doesn’t want to call a mistrial because it would require acknowledging the errors and two years of effort spent for naught, plus the possibility that the district attorney’s office would reindict it anyway because Fani Willis is just that keen on seeing a conviction here. He knows this is going to be reversed on appeal, but cynically would rather keep Williams and the rest jailed until then because tying them down in court keeps them off the street and away from their opps.

At least, that’s my interpretation. I would ask him, but judges don’t talk.

Nonetheless, I no longer believe Glanville is measuring the law. I believe he is measuring the pain, looking for the path of least agony. Going through beats going back.

Woody will be asked what was said in the meeting. If Woody lies, Glanville will know. And if Glanville allows perjury to propagate, that becomes another basis for an appeal and reversal.