![]() ![]() “I’ve been trying cases 40 years”, said attorney Stanley Cohen, who is representing one of the 61 defendants. Nonetheless, Fowler filed the motion to include Paez Terán’s diary on 15 November – and made the unusual move of attaching the document. Photograph: Steve Eberhardt/Zuma Press Wire/Shutterstock Protesters in Atlanta’s Gresham Park march near the location of the proposed new police facility, on 28 June. This is untrue: Tortuguita, and other “forest defenders”, were not camped on the future construction site – they were in a public park about a mile away. The state begins its motion with a falsehood about the activist’s killing by telling the court that police came upon the tent where Paez Terán was sleeping that January morning in the “woods that will be the site of the Atlanta Public Safety Training Center … purpose of the sweep was to clear the woods so that construction on the site could safely commence”. The Georgia bureau of investigations concluded police were justified in killing them because the activist fired a gun first – but has refused to release its investigative file to the public. ![]() Georgia state troopers shot and killed Tortuguita, who used they/them pronouns, on 18 January. The diary does contain expressions of hatred for the police, and drawings depicting violence against police. The one example of “lists and notes” the prosecution cites in its motion was written in another state – Florida – about a year before Paez Terán even knew about Cop City, according to a friend who was at the meeting cited and who wished to remain anonymous. However, only about a dozen of the diary’s 150 or so pages were written while the activist was camped in protest against the training center at a public park near the project’s planned site, and none of those pages contains such material. The case is the first time a racketeering law has been used against so many defendants in a political prosecution these laws were developed to combat the mafia. The state’s motion says the diary is needed to prove that dozens of defendants tied to opposition against the training center near Atlanta were involved in a criminal conspiracy in part because the document contains “to-do lists and notes from meetings” – suggesting evidence of criminal acts against Cop City.
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