The State Is Wielding Grand Jury Subpoenas Against Cop City Activists

Hartford’s grand jury subpoena sought testimony in an arson case connected to Stop Cop City. On December 30, 2023, a suspect burned down a pair of cement trucks belonging to Thomas Concrete, a contractor that activists sayis involved in the construction of Cop City. The local responding agency, the Dorchester County Sheriff’s Office, made an arrest. Noting the “From Weelaunee” and “You build it, we burn it” graffiti on the trucks, the sheriff’s office drew a spurious connection to the Climate Justice Alliance, a broad-based nonprofit concerned with a diversity of environmental issues. On the basis that the Climate Justice Alliance maintains a map of Cop City contractors accompanied by the sentence “every action has an impact,” the Dorchester County Sheriff’s Office characterized the organization as an “extremist group” and passed along the information to the ATF. (Never mind that both slogans are in common usage in the movement; Weelaunee refers to the Indigenous name of the forest destroyed to build the police training center, and “if you build it, we will burn it” is a common chant at Stop Cop City protests in Atlanta.) The Dorchester County Sheriff’s Office declined to comment on the characterization.

There was been a chronic deficit of democracy surrounding Cop City, with indefinitely delayed electoral campaigns, city council votes taken over widespread opposition and felony charges for distributing flyers. With the ballot initiative in legal limbo with an earliest vote date of 2025 and the facility slated to open in December of this year, activists conducted letter writing campaigns, chained themselves to construction equipment andprotested in corporate lobbies to pressure Cop City contractors.

For some activists, with legal remedies exhausted and protest stymied, targeting the contractors involved in the construction of Cop City provided on alternate lever to delay or block the project.

Arson is but one arrow in the quiver of activists’ campaign to delay construction through pressuring contractors to drop out of the project. It’s a high-risk tactic, with the ATF, FBI and the Georgia Bureau of Investigation on the case. In Atlanta, police have undertaken SWAT-style raids in which they wrenched an arson suspect shirtless out of her house and dragged a man by his hair. While scattered arrests have been made, authorities remain at a loss in solving many of the arson cases. In January, Atlanta Police Chief Darin Schierbaum announced in a joint press conference with ATF and FBI officials that CrimeStoppers of Greater Atlanta would erect over 450 billboards across seven cities advertising a $200,000 reward for information on Cop City-related arsons, including the torching of Thomas Construction trucks in South Carolina.

In the case of Hartford’s grand jury summons, the government is again casting a broad net. In the previously mentioned document obtained by FOIA, no one copied on the email, including representatives from the Georgia Bureau of Investigation, City of Atlanta, FBI and ATF, objected to the uncertainty in the characterization of Hartford as either a “a witness” or a “possible co-conspirator.”

Lauren Regan, executive director at the Civil Liberties Defense Center, explained that activists, as potentially uncooperative witnesses, are typically subpoenaed only once grand juries have nearly completed their investigation. Regan told Truthout, “More often than not, in a movement scenario, either a grand jury is meeting and nobody knows about it, or they’re not going to start tapping activists as witnesses until they’ve basically got what they want. At that point, often the purpose of subpoenaing an activist into a grand jury is more for classic state repression purposes than actual investigative purposes.”

As a tool of repression, grand juries are a minefield for activists. Because the purpose of a grand jury is to decide whether there’s enough evidence to make an indictment, many of the procedural protections governing trials cease to apply. The Sixth Amendment to the Constitution guarantees the right to legal counsel in criminal trials, but defense attorneys are barred from the room. The rules of evidence don’t apply; and witnesses face a prosecutor with neither a defense attorney nor judge present. (A grand jury witness can and should write down notes about the questions asked, and they’re permitted to leave the room after every question to draft responses with their lawyer.)

With the rules of criminal procedure suspended, grand juries can be a fishing expedition with little factual basis. According to the Grand Jury Resistance Project, grand juries have high potential for abuse because witnesses can be compelled to testify absent a requirement for the government to provide a reason to believe the target knows information about a particular crime. Regan warned, “It’s really common for the government to purposefully start incorrect rumors, to start a panic or create a stir in the activist community. They like to hit the hive and watch for the buzz.”

As a tactic of state repression, grand juries can imprison activists who refuse to testify. Typically, the Fifth Amendment offers protection against self-incrimination, but refusing to testify to a grand jury opens the possibility of forcing uncooperative witnesses to serve up to a year and a half in jail to coerce testimony, or up to three years if the duration of the grand jury is extended. For vulnerable members of a community, who might have family members to care for or jobs they’re afraid to lose, the decision of whether to resist a grand jury or accede to questioning about their friends and activist groups can be a difficult one.

In Hartford’s case, complying with a grand jury summons that could endanger fellow activists was never in question. In a statement, Hartford wrote, “I am never going to comply with a subpoena or cooperate with a grand jury…. I reject all grand juries as archaic, opaque, and undemocratic. Any prison time they threaten me with would be a stain on the American legal system. May we live to see a day when none of our friends are held hostage by the state.”

The grand jury subpoena didn’t come as a complete surprise; ATF Agent Andrew Alexander from the Charleston field office conducted a door knock at Hartford’s mom’s house a few months prior to traveling to the Atlanta area to serve the subpoena. In the meantime, Hartford began to tap into preexisting jail support infrastructure. They began research into what federal facility they might be sent to for resisting the grand jury summons, contacted the National Lawyers Guild to find a low-cost lawyer and began fundraising to cover the expenses incurred in grand jury resistance.

After nearly two months, Hartford’s lawyer succeeded in getting the subpoena quashed, releasing Hartford from the obligation to testify before the grand jury. Hartford credits the strong infrastructure of community support with allowing them to take the risk of resisting the subpoena, and in communicating to the state an unwillingness to testify. “Without that strong backbone behind me, I would probably be in jail right now,” Hartford told Truthout. Regan, too, emphasized the need for strong community support when a grand jury summons comes down. “When it comes to this type of state repression, the government will double down on tactics they think are working for them, and they will often give up on the ones that they think are not going to be helpful. It’s often really important for a community to put on a united, strong and unafraid front.”

Part of that process involves activists communicating to their communities when the state begins to issue grand jury summons. There’s a long tradition of activists standing together against grand juries. In 2005, former Black Panthers refused to testify in a reopened case into a police shooting that wasoriginally dismissed because the state obtained evidence via torture, and animal rights and environmental activists have consistently resisted grand jury inquisitions. Nothing legally bars activists from disclosing grand jury subpoenas, and should they choose to testify, activists can share the content of questions asked.

“A lot of the state’s power comes from maintaining your silence about it,” Hartford concluded.