Georgia Judge Dismisses Racketeering Charges Against ‘Cop City’ Activists

Dozens of protesters had been indicted after the state attorney general said that their movement amounted to a violent criminal enterprise.

A Georgia judge dismissed racketeering charges on Tuesday against dozens of activists who had fought the construction of a police and fire training center outside of Atlanta that became known as “Cop City,” dealing a major setback to state officials who had pursued an unusually aggressive case against the protesters.

The plan to transform a spread of forest on the outskirts of the city had drawn activists from across the country, who camped in the trees and repeatedly clashed with law enforcement officers for nearly two years.

After sweeping them from the woods, Georgia officials argued that the demonstrators were part of a criminal enterprise bent on sowing violence and disorder, and in 2023 the state attorney general charged 61 activists with racketeering. The case became one of the largest of its kind brought against protesters.

In his ruling on Tuesday, Judge Kevin M. Farmer of Superior Court of Fulton County cited what was essentially a technical misstep by the attorney general’s office as justification for tossing the charges against the protesters named in the racketeering indictment. Prosecutors and the activists had been waiting for Judge Farmer’s order for months, after he signaled his intentions to dismiss the charges during a hearing in September.

The judge found that state prosecutors had failed to get Gov. Brian Kemp’s permission to move forward with a case that would otherwise be within the remit of a local district attorney. (Mr. Kemp, a Republican and a persistent critic of the activists, would have likely signed off.)

Yet Judge Farmer indicated that prosecutors had not exhausted their ability to pursue a criminal case against the activists. “That permission may still be sought and the charges brought properly,” he wrote, “but they were not in this case.”

In the 109-page indictment, prosecutors accused the activists of arson, domestic terrorism and money laundering, and claimed that they had thrown Molotov cocktails and fireworks at police officers, firefighters and emergency workers.

In a statement on Tuesday, the office of Chris Carr, the Georgia attorney general, said that it would appeal the judge’s decision and vowed to “continue to vigorously pursue this domestic terrorism case to ensure that justice is served.”

Activists, civil liberties groups and other critics had argued that the prosecution was an unsettling and dangerous overreach. Lawyers from the American Civil Liberties Union had called the charges “breathtakingly broad.”

Surinder Chadha Jimenez, a lawyer for one of the activists, described the indictment as “bloated and overblown.”

“In this case, they went too far,” he said on Wednesday. “And I think that’s what the judge has told them — that this is not what you have the authority to do, and if you want to do it, do it the right way.”

The protesters had been stirred to action in 2021 over proposals for the Atlanta Public Safety Center, as the training facility is officially known. The center, originally slated to cost $90 million, would replace facilities that officials described as outdated and ill-equipped to handle the training needs of police officers and firefighters in a complex urban environment.

Designs for the new facility included mock versions of a nightclub, a convenience store and houses.

Opponents preferred to spend the money elsewhere and argued that the center could contribute to a more militarized police force, worsening tensions between law enforcement and minority communities. Environmental activists also wanted to preserve the wooded area where it would be built, an old prison farm that had become a precious expanse of undeveloped green space.

State and local law enforcement officers were dispatched in late 2022 to clear activists from the proposed construction site, which led to violent confrontations. In one skirmish in January 2023, an activist was fatally shot and a state trooper was injured by gunfire.

The fight reverberated far beyond Atlanta, mobilizing activists across the country and even outside it, with some coming from Canada and France. State officials contended that the activist efforts had crossed into a more sinister campaign because of the influence of out-of-state agitators. Many of those who were charged were not from Georgia.

Mr. Carr, a Republican who is running for governor of Georgia, used the state’s Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act, or RICO, which enables prosecutors to stitch together seemingly disparate accusations and an array of people linked by association to a criminal conspiracy or enterprise.

Prosecutors traced the roots of the campaign back to almost a year before city officials had announced the leasing of the land to build the training center. That was May 25, 2020, the day that George Floyd was killed by the Minneapolis police, which kicked off nationwide demonstrations, including in Atlanta.

In the indictment, prosecutors referred to the Cop City activists as “anti-government anarchists” and claimed that their campaign “evolved into a broader antigovernment, anti-police and anti-corporate extremist organization.”

Yet in hearings earlier in 2025, Judge Farmer needled the state over that portrayal. At one point, he said parts of the indictment read like “a bad political science paper,” criticizing the broad generalizations about the activists’ political beliefs and a reliance on unnamed witnesses. “There’s problems with this,” he said.

The case has become the latest high-profile RICO case in Georgia with a disappointing outcome for prosecutors.

The same law was used by prosecutors in Atlanta against President Trump and his associates over their efforts to subvert his election loss in Georgia in 2020, as well as against the rapper Young Thug and YSL, a record label that was accused of doubling as a criminal enterprise. Both cases limped toward disappointing results for Fani T. Willis, the Fulton County district attorney.

The case against Mr. Trump, dismissed last month, was derailed when state judges disqualified Ms. Willis over revelations about a romantic relationship she had with the lawyer she had hired to manage the prosecution. In the YSL case, the last defendants were acquitted last year in a trial that was the longest in Georgia history.

But for the activists in the Cop City case, any sense of relief has been tempered by an expectation that the dismissals are merely another wrinkle in what has already been a protracted legal fight. State officials have continuously reaffirmed their commitment to criminally prosecuting the activists, a handful of whom still face charges of domestic terrorism and arson.

“This will delay the case at least another year,” Mr. Chadha Jimenez said in an interview in the fall, referring to the dismissal. “How long could it take to prosecute a bunch of hippies hanging out in a park? You can’t do that. You were overreaching from the beginning.”

As the criminal cases moved forward, the campaign to stop the construction of the training center largely fizzled. A proposed referendum to have Atlanta residents approve building it stalled in the courts. Mr. Kemp and the mayor of Atlanta, Andre Dickens, were at the ribbon-cutting when the center opened in April.

Related Content