Money-laundering charges dropped against bail fund in Cop City protest case

Money-laundering charges are being dropped against a bail fund swept up in an unprecedented case involving 61 people accused of a criminal conspiracy while protesting against the controversial Georgia police training center known colloquially as “Cop City”.

Deputy attorney general John Fowler unexpectedly told Fulton county superior court judge Kimberly Esmond Adams and attorneys for several of the case’s defendants in a hearing this week that he was dropping charges underlying 15 of the 18 counts included in the Rico, or racketeering, indictment.

The charges targeted the Atlanta Solidarity Fund (ASF), one of nearly 100 similar organizations across the country that help arrested protesters with bail, legal defense and related needs. The group is at the center of the state’s case; its three members are mentioned more than 120 times in last September’s 109-page indictment.

Related: Atlanta police surveil people opposing ‘Cop City’: ‘There’s this constant stalking feeling’

The fund’s members still face racketeering charges in the case, months from trial. It is the first time a state Rico law is being used to prosecute this many defendants in connection with a protest or social movement, experts have told the Guardian. Rico charges are usually reserved for use against organized crime.

The decision showed “these charges are baseless, and this is the state acknowledging that the entire narrative they’ve built [in the case] was a fiction”, said Marlon Kautz, one of the three ASF defendants. Still, the fund’s members withstood a Swat-style raid on their Atlanta house in May of last year, and have suffered subsequent problems with banks and donation platforms due to the charges – “the consequences of demonization”, Kautz said.

The attorney general’s office did not answer a query from the Guardian about the reason behind the announcement. Several people who were in the courtroom said Fowler called the decision “a close call” – to which Judge Esmond Adams responded: “Let’s be clear – you dropped these charges because you knew they wouldn’t prevail.”

The hearing was meant to consider a group of five of the 61 defendants and their motions to dismiss the case altogether due to deficiencies in the state’s historic indictment, leveled against dozens of people linked to a wide-ranging protest movement against the planned training center now in its fourth year.

The opposition is both local and national, and includes concerns ranging from the environmental impacts of the 171-acre (69-hectare) footprint the center will occupy in a large forest south-east of Atlanta, to unchecked police funding and militarization. State and local authorities insist the center is needed for “morale” and “state-of-the-art training”.

“We don’t know what the criminal enterprise was, we don’t know what the dates were,” said Krista Wright Novay, attorney for the ASF’s Savannah Patterson, about the indictment’s problems.

“Also, the indictment doesn’t tell us what the racketeering acts are,” said Chris Carraway, whose motion to dismiss the case on behalf of defendant Sonali Gupta was also considered. “Is it passing out flyers? Is it attending a protest? And what does this have to do with individual defendants?”

Before the announcement, deputy attorney general Fowler’s integrity in the case had been questioned. The Guardian confirmed that he obtained emails between the ASF’s members and their attorneys and shared them with police investigators and others, as another motion asserts – and that he did the same with communications of other defendants in the case.

“Attorney-client privilege wasn’t handled the way it should have – one of the most intensely upheld privileges in jurisprudence,” said Wright Novay.

Fowler also denied the existence of police messages on Signal in court, despite being presented, in another motion from defense attorneys, with evidence from the Guardian of law enforcement leadership ordering officers last year to download the encrypted phone app for that very purpose.

Meanwhile, Kautz, of the ASF, said about the money-laundering charges being dropped against him and his co-defendants: “[It] does nothing to undo the harm to us and to the many political protesters whose lives have already been drastically impacted. But it does serve as a reminder that prosecutions against political movements are not a pursuit of justice.”

• This story was amended on 19 September to reflect that 15 counts were dropped, not 14.