Young Thug Trial: Last Pending Mistrial Motion Denied, Testimony to Resume Monday
The new judge overseeing Young Thug’s problem-plagued gang and racketeering trial has denied the final pending mistrial motion related to the secret meeting between prosecutors, a sworn witness and the trial’s former boss, Judge Ural Glanville, that led to Glanville’s removal from the case.
The highly anticipated decision means the longest-running criminal trial in Georgia state history will restart when jurors return Monday after a nearly two-month break.
In her decision late Thursday, Fulton County Judge Paige Reese Whitaker acknowledged that while the secret June 10 meeting with sworn state’s witness Kenneth “Woody” Copeland “was about more than just the parameters of Copeland’s immunity” and included arguably inaccurate information given to Copeland, it didn’t violate the due process rights of the defendants in the case, including rap artist Deamonte “Yak Gotti” Kendrick, whose lawyers Douglas Weinstein and E. Jay Abt filed the mistrial motion that was joined by other co-defendants.
“Because the meeting dealt with Copeland’s immunity grant and its ancillary issues, it was not a critical state of the trial at which the defendant had a right to be present,” Whitaker wrote. She said she was not persuaded by the additional claim Judge Glanville “coerced” Copeland to testify.
“The predecessor judge did not on the whole use intimidating rhetoric, but rather sought to ensure that Copeland understood the nuances of the decision he had to make; and he explained that many of the decisions about what could happen to Copeland were not his to make but were up to the prosecutors. Still, some of the information provided to Copeland may have been inaccurate,” she wrote. According to the ruling, the recusal of Judge Glanville on July 15 “mooted” any claim he showed “bias.”
Kendrick’s lawyer said he was disappointed in the ruling and had requested Judge Whitaker’s permission to take the issue to an appellate court immediately. “This trial is so riddled with errors that nobody would expect any verdict against my client to be upheld on appeal,” Weinstein tells Rolling Stone. “Here’s an issue that’s perfect to take up on appeal now, so we can cut out the next eight months if it’s going to be unnecessary.”
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The lawyer said he was troubled by the court’s finding that Judge Glanville’s recusal made the question of his alleged bias a non-issue. “I fully believe Judge Whitaker is going to give us a fair trial going forward. The issue I have is that removing [Glanville} does nothing to remedy the due process violations that have happened over the last 18 months before his removal,” he said.
Judge Whitaker’s ruling cleared a wide path for testimony in the now-notorious RICO trial, which has been on hiatus since June 18, to resume with the same jury that’s already heard from more than 70 witnesses. The jurors are expected to file into the courtroom Monday and hear instructions that Judge Glanville is no longer in charge and that they’re to disregard any “disparaging” comments he ever made about any lawyers on the case.
Copeland, described by prosecutors as an un-indicted co-conspirator, is due to return to the stand unless he once again refuses to testify and is sent to jail on a contempt charge. If that happens, jurors will be instructed to disregard everything he said during all six days of his testimony in mid-June. If he agrees to answer questions under his immunity deal with prosecutors, jurors will learn that the trial, as far as they’re concerned, is essentially being re-wound to at least the afternoon of June 12. They will be asked to simply forget anything Copeland said during the second half of June 12 and his three subsequent days of testimony ending June 17.
Judge Whitaker said earlier this week that it’s possible some of Copeland’s examination from his first three days on the stand could remain on the record, but only the portions agreed to by lawyers for Young Thug and his five co-defendants in the trial. The judge signaled the defense had a right to spike any of the prior testimony from Copeland because he was wrongly instructed during the June 10 meeting that he could be held in jail well beyond the end of Young Thug’s trial for refusing to testify.
Jury instructions were still being drafted as of Thursday, but Judge Whitaker previously ruled that June 12 was the cutoff for possible testimony because that was the date Kendrick filed his motion to recuse Judge Glanville over the secret meeting. Glanville denied the motion at the time and allowed Copeland’s testimony to continue rather than stopping the trial while defense lawyers challenged his decision.
The high-profile trial began with jury selection in January 2023 and finally moved on to opening statements last November. Citing their 65-count indictment, prosecutors said Young Thug, born Jeffery Williams, ran a Bloods-affiliated street gang called “Young Slime Life” [YSL] that terrorized Atlanta with drug sales, armed robberies and at least three murders. In a controversial ruling, prosecutors won the right to use Williams’ rap lyrics as evidence in the case.
Williams, 32, denies the charges. He says YSL stands for Young Stoner Life, the name of his record label. His lawyer Brian Steel has called the sprawling RICO indictment, which names 28 defendants, “unconscionable and unconstitutional.” In his opening statement, Steel said Williams surmounted “severe poverty” to become a world-renowned musician. “He is not sitting there telling people to kill people. He doesn’t need their money. Jeffery is worth tens of millions of dollars.” Steel said Williams “doesn’t even know most of the people in this indictment.”
The trial with Williams, Kendrick and four other co-defendants started to publicly implode on June 10 when Steel confronted Judge Glanville about his meeting with Copeland and Fulton County Deputy District Attorneys Adriane Love and Simone Hylton. Judge Glanville held Steel in contempt and had him arrested when the lawyer refused to say how he learned of the meeting. Glanville deflected multiple calls for his recusal over the next few weeks but finally halted the trial and released the meeting transcript on July 1, setting the stage for his July 15 recusal by another judge.
In a flurry of filings on July 8, Steel and his co-counsel Keith Adams called the meeting “illegal, immoral and unethical.” They argued Judge Glanville and prosecutors Love and Hylton were “working together” during the meeting to pressure Copeland to testify. The judge who ultimately recused Glanville a week later said she did not find anything “inherently improper” with the in-chambers meeting itself but that Glanville essentially went too far defending it in the aftermath, leading to a perception of impartiality.
Once Judge Whitaker was handed the reins the same week as the recusal, she immediately promised to move forward “efficiently and expeditiously.” On July 30, she made good on that vow, issuing a number of oral rulings from the bench. Her first ruling was to deny prosecutors’ request for a “gag order” preventing lawyers from speaking publicly about the case. She then denied two other mistrial motions: one from Steel based on alleged prosecutor misconduct and judicial bias; and one from the defense lawyer for defendant Quamarvious Nichols that argued it was too late in the process for a new judge to take control of the trial.
Judge Whitaker took the longest to rule on the mistrial motion from Kendrick’s lawyers apparently because it argued the most extensive grounds for tossing the trial and was filed after Judge Glanville denied a similar mistrial motion from Steel before his recusal. Their motion, which was filed July 23 and subsequently joined by Steel and lawyers for several other defendants, argued Glanville violated the defendants’ constitutional rights when he excluded the defense. Prosecutors claim Copeland previously made statements implicating members of YSL in one of the murders listed in the indictment. Defense lawyers say Copeland’s statements are routinely inconsistent and simply not credible, and that they had to right to hear anything he said during the ex-parte meeting.
Importantly, Weinstein and Abt also accused prosecutors Love and Hylton of “goading” the defense into demanding a mistrial over the June 10 ex-parte meeting. They argued prosecutors knew they were losing their case, so they allegedly went “looking for an opportunity to restart the trial” by doing something so “egregious,” defense lawyers would have “no choice but to request a mistrial.”
“I cannot believe that they would have asked for this ex-parte and conducted the ex-parte in the fashion they did it unless they knew they would be forcing us into a position to request a mistrial,” Weinstein argued to Judge Whitaker on July 30. “We are winning this case. The state’s witnesses have not testified in the way that I imagine they expected them to testify, and I do not believe that they should be allowed a do-over in this case.”
Love responded by saying she did not want to start over. “If they’re winning, then let’s just keep it rolling because the state vehemently objects to a mistrial,” Love argued. “If they feel they’re winning, let’s just keep it rolling.”
Later in the day on July 30, Judge Whitaker shared with the defense a new transcript from yet another ex-parte meeting that Judge Glanville held with prosecutors on June 7, the Friday before the infamous June 10 meeting. According to the transcript, Love told Glanville in that meeting that she was concerned Copeland’s lawyer was “tampering” with Copeland’s willingness to testify and doing so at the behest of “defense counsel” in the case. Judge Glanville said there had been “a lot of innuendo” that “the defense counsel have inserted themselves in this particular process,” according to the transcript obtained by Rolling Stone.
Max Schardt, the defense lawyer for Williams’ co-defendant Shannon Stillwell, told Judge Whitaker on July 31 that he believed the June 7 meeting was “absolutely gross and disgusting.” He said prosecutors had “trashed” other lawyers in the case unfairly while Judge Glanville showed alleged bias toward the state’s position. “This is broken, and it’s not okay. It’s not okay. It’s offensive,” Schardt argued. “I’m heated right now. Steam has been coming off my bald head all night. Nothing about this is okay. Yes, we need to revisit everything.”
Before her latest and most major ruling, Judge Whitaker denied a new bond motion from Williams last week, saying he didn’t present a “legitimate” change in circumstances that would allow her to review Judge Glanville’s prior denial. In his new motion, Williams asked to be released on bond with house arrest and 24-hour surveillance pending the outcome of the trial. Steel argued in the renewed bond motion that Williams is being held in “squalor” in Cobb County jail and that it was unfair he’s been languishing behind bars since his May 2022 arrest while his legal process moves at such a glacial pace. Steel said Williams is being held in a small, ant-infested cement cell 22 hours a day and forced to live off “inedible food” when not in trial.
While Steel argued that Judge Glanville’s recusal presented an adequate change in circumstances, Judge Whitaker wasn’t convinced. After hearing her ruling, Weinstein asked Judge Whitaker to refrain from ruling on Kendrick’s latest bond motion until she made her ruling on his mistrial motion.
Speaking to Rolling Stone last week, Weinstein said he believed Judge Whitaker was an improvement over her predecessor. “I’m very pleased with Judge Whitaker being selected for the case, and by all appearances from the few days we’ve been in court, she is timely and efficient and will move with deliberate speed through the case, which is what I’ve been asking for for months,” Weinstein said. “She clearly knows the law well and seems to be a scholar, someone I could see on an appellate court one day.”