FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE: July 1, 2024
Motion to Dismiss Filed Today by Cop City RICO Defendant Who Argues Forest-Related Exculpatory Evidence Was Destroyed Before the Court’s Discovery Deadline
Motion filed by RICO defendant Jamie Marsicano argues that Attorney General acted in “bad faith” by failing to comply with a Court order to arrange site visit for defense lawyers
ATLANTA, GA – A motion was filed today in Superior Court to dismiss the charges against several of the 61 protesters indicted in August under Georgia’s Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations (RICO) in connection with yearslong protests against the proposed $109 million police training facility in Atlanta, dubbed “Cop City.” Legal counsel for Jamie Marsicano filed a motion to dismiss all forest-related counts of the RICO indictment and an alternative motion to exclude all forest-related evidence due to the destruction of the Weelaune Forest, the alleged scene of the crime for Marsicano and dozens of her co-defendants.
Marsicano’s lawyers have been asking for months for a site visit to the Weelaunee Forest, which the Court has affirmed is at the heart of the indictment. In March, Marsicano filed a motion to prevent destruction of discovery, seeking to preserve areas of the forest related to the alleged crimes. At a case management hearing on May 7, the Court ordered the State, which has sole authority over access to the forest, to arrange a site visit by June. That site visit never happened and, according to Marsicano’s motion, which provides sattelite image overlays that illustrate the destruction, “[m]aterial, exculpatory evidence has been forever lost.”
Specifically, the motion filed today by Marsicano asks the Court to dismiss all forest-related counts, under statutory and consitutional law, because material evidence has been “irreversibly altered and destroyed.” Marsicano argues that the State has “acted in bad faith” by “permitting the destruction of the forest while not allowing the defense to perform a timely site visit.” The Weelaunee Forest “possessed an exculpatory value that was apparent before the State allowed it to be destroyed and it is impossible to obtain comparable evidence,” according to the motion. If the Court does not dismiss charges against Marsicano, she is alternatively asking the Court to exclude all forest-related evidence, given the State’s failure to give access to the forest by the Court’s deadline.
Marsicano’s lawyers offered an analogy to understand the significance of the evidence destruction. “[I]f 61 people were accused of conducting complex bank robberies over three years, and the large bank at issue was actively being demolished, the State could not plausibly argue that aerial maps and videos, select photographs, written reports, and convoluted body-worn camera recordings would be comparable evidence to an actual visit to the bank before it was destroyed,” read Marsicano’s motion filed today, authored by her lawyer Xavier T. de Janon. “And destroying the vault is as damaging as destroying the lobby, because exculpatory evidence could evidently be found at both sites.”
Today’s motion comes a week after another motion to dismiss was filed by legal counsel for three other RICO defendants, organizers with the nonprofit Atlanta Solidarity Fund (ASF), accusing Georgia Deputy Attorney General John Fowler’s prosecutorial team of extensively violating multiple defendants’ constitutional right to attorney-client confidentiality. Despite assuring defendants and their attorneys that measures were in place to prevent improper disclosure, the Attorney General’s Office shared the privileged information with Atlanta Police Department (APD) investigators and each defense team for the 61 RICO defendants. Alternatively, the motion argues that the Court should disqualify the Attorney General’s Office from any further prosecution of the case, and to disqualify the Homeland Security Unit of the APD from any further participation in the case.
The State’s actions represented a “brazen violation of the attorney-client privilege, the Sixth Amendment, and the Due Process Clause of the United States Constitution, and the Georgia Constitutional right to counsel in all cases,” according to the ASF motion. Notably, previous reporting confirmed that the State’s breach of attorney-client confidentiality was not limited only to the three ASF defendants, as attorneys for other defendants in the sweeping RICO prosecution verified that the State shared privileged information pertaining to their clients as well. The Court has yet to rule on this motion, which could have implications for a number of additional pending RICO cases.
“Sharing privileged information in this way, after the Attorney General’s office agreed to filter it out, would be a major violation,” said Devin Franklin, Movement Policy Counsel at the Southern Center for Human Rights and a former Fulton County Public Defender. “It’s hard to overstate the recklessness and carelessness behind such an action. This could and should jeopardize the state’s entire case.”
Today’s motion also comes less than a month after the Georgia Court of Appeals heard oral arguments in the case of Ayla King, the first RICO defendant to be set for trial in connection with the Cop City cases. King is appealing the denial of their motion to dismiss based on a violation of their speedy trial rights. King filed for a speedy trial in October 2023, but according to their lawyers, the trial did not occur within the requisite statutory period of two court terms, violating King’s rights under Georgia law. The Court of Appeals ruling is still forthcoming.
Over 100 people have been arrested in efforts to criminalize political organizing and intimidate the Stop Cop City movement. More than 40 activists indicted for RICO were also arrested under Georgia’s Domestic Terrorism law. Some of those arrests occurred while people were attending a music festival in the South River Forest in March 2023, including Marsicano.
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For more information on the sweeping criminal cases, and ways to support the defendants and the movement to Stop Cop City, go to: weelauneethefree.org.
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