The diary of an environmental activist police shot and killed earlier this year is playing a crucial role in Georgia’s conspiracy case against 61 people tied to a police and fire department training center known as “Cop City”, offering an early window into the state’s approach to the prosecution.
The Georgia deputy attorney general, John Fowler, has put forward a legal motion to enter the diary of Manuel Paez Terán, known as Tortuguita, as evidence in the Rico – or racketeering – case, sidestepping standard legal procedure while employing smear tactics and falsehoods, said observers of the case and based on the Guardian’s reporting.
“Tortuguita is dead – they’re not prosecuting Tortuguita,” said Dan Berger, a historian on social movements. “They’re trying to use the diary of somebody police killed to criminalize a whole movement. … The legal system obviously has no respect for privacy when the government seeks to criminalize thoughts and feelings. It’s very alarming.”
The state’s motion says the diary is needed to prove that dozens of defendants tied to opposition against the training center near Atlanta were involved in a criminal conspiracy in part because the document contains “to-do lists and notes from meetings” – suggesting evidence of criminal acts against Cop City. The case is the first time a racketeering law has been used against so many defendants in a political prosecution; these laws were developed to combat the mafia.
However, only about a dozen of the diary’s 150 or so pages were written while the activist was camped in protest against the training center at a public park near the project’s planned site, and none of those pages contains such material.
The one example of “lists and notes” the prosecution cites in its motion was written in another state – Florida – about a year before Paez Terán even knew about Cop City, according to a friend who was at the meeting cited and who wished to remain anonymous. The diary does contain expressions of hatred for the police, and drawings depicting violence against police.
Georgia state troopers shot and killed Tortuguita, who used they/them pronouns, on 18 January. The Georgia bureau of investigations concluded police were justified in killing them because the activist fired a gun first – but has refused to release its investigative file to the public.
The state begins its motion with a falsehood about the activist’s killing by telling the court that police came upon the tent where Paez Terán was sleeping that January morning in the “woods that will be the site of the Atlanta Public Safety Training Center [and that the] … purpose of the sweep was to clear the woods so that construction on the site could safely commence”.
This is untrue: Tortuguita, and other “forest defenders”, were not camped on the future construction site – they were in a public park about a mile away.
Nonetheless, Fowler filed the motion to include Paez Terán’s diary on 15 November – and made the unusual move of attaching the document.
“I’ve been trying cases 40 years”, said attorney Stanley Cohen, who is representing one of the 61 defendants. “The general policy is if you’re making an application for admission of evidence, you do it … without it being released first to the public marketplace of ideas.”
But by attaching the diary, the state allowed media and the public to access the document, and a week passed before the Fulton county judge Kimberly M Esmond Adams could rule on a motion from attorneys for one of the 61 defendants to seal the document. The judge ruled in favor of the motion last Wednesday, but local media had already obtained the diary and several unquestioningly repeated the state’s characterization of the document as written by someone who hated police – and as offering a view onto the mindset of the 61 defendants.
The judge will rule at a later date on whether the diary should be admitted as evidence.
Historian Berger noted that state prosecutions have attempted to use the personal writings of political defendants before – including, famously, letters Angela Davis wrote to Black Panther George Jackson – in the attempt to provide evidence of specific criminal acts. In the Davis case, the letters contained no such proof.
Nonetheless, the state uses such material because it is “building a narrative – and the narrative gets entrenched through repetition”, said Berger. “Lies and distortions are part of that.”
Paez Terán’s diary, mostly written during 2021, when they lived in Florida, does list reports from meetings – on subjects such as community gardening, a book club, food distribution, getting public transportation cards to people living on the streets and helping queer people of color pay rent and medical bills, according to their friend. There are notes from meetings of Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), the 118-year-old labor union to which Paez Terán belonged.
The diary also contains numerous essays reflecting on society and the 26-year-old’s place in it, with ideas such as “build[ing] a better society for our descendants”, concerns about climate change and capitalism’s impact on people of color – as well as poems such as one titled “Poem under a tree” that includes the line: “I love bees, they remind me of all that is possible”.
Some of the diary’s pages include drawings depicting burning police cars or shooting at police, or essays on the same subjects. The two types of entries – working toward a better world and hatred for police – show how the activist “was a person who … had anger and spite toward the police state, because they loved people who were victimized by it – and how they channeled that towards helping oppressed people, in solidarity”, said their friend.
Tortuguita wrote their last entry on 15 December, two days after police raided the forest. “They call us terrorists for trying to defend the forest,” they wrote. “Our resistance cannot be stopped.
“Momma didn’t raise a coward – fear will not stop me.”
Jeff Filipovits, one of the attorneys representing Paez Terán’s family, saw the state’s move regarding the diary as “political … It’s obviously an attempt to make the diary public … [and] further demonize the defendants and Manuel.”.
Filipovits has been pushing for 10 months to get evidence on the activist’s death released; he also saw the state’s motion as linked to the continuing justification for not doing so. “They tie Manuel to all the Rico defendants, so they can continue to withhold evidence from the shooting,” he said.
As for the diary’s content, the attorney said:“They were a kid in their early 20s. What the hell are we supposed to draw from all that? Except, maybe, don’t keep a journal.”
