The Atlanta Public Safety Training Center — known to its opponents as Cop City — has been the subject of one of the largest state-level prosecutions of an environmental movement in U.S. history. Carr\'s 2023 racketeering case was the apex of that effort. Through 2024 it visibly came apart.
The indictment
The September 5, 2023 indictment named 61 defendants. The state\'s theory was that the broad multi-tendency movement against the Atlanta training-center project — encampments in the Weelaunee Forest, bail-fund work, mutual-aid organizing, leafleting, demonstrations at corporate offices, mass-mobilization weeks of action — constituted a racketeering enterprise within the meaning of Georgia\'s RICO statute. Predicate acts charged ranged from felony intimidation to misdemeanor trespass to handing out fliers. Three defendants associated with the Atlanta Solidarity Fund were charged separately and earlier on money-laundering and charity-fraud theories tied to bail-fund accounting.
The volume of the indictment — 109 pages, 220+ overt acts, 61 named defendants — was, in critics\' reading, less a charging document than a charging-as-suppression document. The point was the prosecution itself, not the convictions.
The 2024 pretrial year
Through 2024, defense counsel pressed motions on the threshold question that would eventually decide the case: whether the Georgia Attorney General had the statutory authority to bring a RICO prosecution at all without express written authorization from the governor, as Georgia law on its face requires. Carr\'s office had not obtained that authorization. The state\'s response was that the authorization requirement was a formality that could be cured at any point.
Through the year defendants moved out of pretrial conditions, were severed from larger groups, fought bond and travel restrictions, and slowly forced the state to litigate the case it had filed. Press attention, after the chaotic first months of the indictment, normalized into beat coverage by Atlanta independent media (the Atlanta Press Collective and Mainline) and national outlets (the Intercept, the Marshall Project, Bolts).
By the end of 2024 the case was structurally weakened. The state had not produced a coherent theory of which defendants were enterprise members and which were merely associates. The bail-fund-related counts against the Atlanta Solidarity Fund defendants were under separate motion. The state\'s reliance on movement attendance as predicate acts had been challenged on First Amendment grounds in multiple briefs.
The 2025 dismissal — built in 2024
The case as a racketeering matter was effectively over by spring 2025, when a Fulton County Superior Court judge dismissed it on the authorization point that defense counsel had built throughout 2024. The dismissal was the result of the year of work the public never saw — motion practice, jurisdictional research, coordinated defense strategy across 61 defendants and dozens of attorneys.
The state has since pivoted to narrower charging instruments — including the April 2026 Cobb County indictment of three protest defendants for a 2022 action at Brasfield & Gorrie\'s Atlanta headquarters — but the broad RICO theory that defined the 2023–2024 phase of the prosecution has been retired. The Stop Cop City movement, with multiple of its named defendants still facing serious individual exposure, treats the 2024 erosion of the RICO case as one of the most consequential pretrial-defense victories of the decade.
