Georgia Attorney General Chris Carr brought fresh charges against three Cop City protesters last week, drawing accusations that he is weaponizing his office to salvage a floundering run for governor ahead of the May 19 Republican primary.
The timing has raised red flags among political observers and legal experts. Carr, who is polling in single digits in his bid for the GOP gubernatorial nomination, announced charges against Katie Marie Kloth, Tyler John Norman, and Hannah Kass in suburban Cobb County just as the statute of limitations was about to expire on conduct that occurred four years earlier. The three face felony charges for criminal damage to property and arson connected to May 2022 actions targeting a construction company working on the $109 million police training center.
"Carr's gubernatorial campaign is flailing," said Paul Glaze, a Democratic political strategist in Georgia. "It's the last gasp of a dying man."
All three defendants are already named in Carr's much larger racketeering case filed in Fulton County in 2023, which targeted 61 people total. That indictment represented the most expansive use of Georgia's RICO statute against a protest movement in U.S. history, but a Fulton County judge dismissed it in December on technical grounds after ruling that Governor Brian Kemp had not formally authorized the prosecution. Kemp provided written authorization on December 31, and the state has appealed.
The new Cobb County indictment arrives as Carr's larger prosecutorial strategy against the protest movement has suffered setbacks. Previous charges have been dropped, including money laundering allegations against the Atlanta Solidarity Fund bail organization.
Matt Scott, editor of the Atlanta Community Press Collective, said the move amounts to political theater. "Carr didn't file this indictment until after he lost the Rico case," Scott said. "It's an open attempt to bring some sort of punishment against Cop City protesters, nicely timed with the primary next month."
The new prosecution creates a unique legal problem for the defendants. Elizabeth Taxel, a clinical professor at the University of Georgia School of Law, warned that forcing the three to defend themselves in two separate jurisdictions for the same conduct against the same prosecutor raises serious due process concerns.
Carr has centered his political messaging on law and order themes, repeatedly emphasizing that Georgia is not a sanctuary for leftist activism. At a recent press conference, he declared: "We are not Oregon. We are not New York. We are not California." He highlighted that all three defendants hail from out of state, a talking point echoed by other state officials since protests against the training center began in 2021.
"It's what he's got to work off of," Glaze noted, saying that anti-protest messaging still holds sway in parts of the state. But he characterized the approach as "all political posturing," noting that Carr's tough-on-crime positioning does not appear to be moving the needle with voters.
Opposition to the training center, which opened last spring, has come from a broad coalition spanning local and national groups. Protesters cite concerns about police militarization and environmental destruction. The Atlanta Police Department has defended the facility as necessary for world-class training and officer recruitment. A city council meeting on the issue drew roughly 1,000 attendees, a record for such proceedings.
Defense attorney Xavier de Janon, who worked on the dismissed RICO case, characterized Carr's prosecutorial push as a political persecution. "I've been saying for years that this is political theater, a political prosecution," De Janon said, adding that Carr's rhetoric about "antifa" mirrors federal government talking points about a threat activists say does not exist as an organized entity.
Author James Rodriguez: "Carr's timing here is so transparent it borders on cynical, and it tells you everything about where his campaign actually stands."
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