When the jury in Young Thug’s gang case returns to court Monday morning after eight weeks off, they’ll discover a new judge on the bench.
Fulton County Superior Court Judge Paige Reese Whitaker denied the last outstanding motion for a mistrial on Thursday night, paving the way for the longest criminal trial in Georgia history to proceed.
She plans to instruct the jurors to disregard days of testimony that took place after former presiding Judge Ural Glanville was told to step aside.
Glanville was removed from the gang and racketeering trial because he mishandled a recusal request stemming from a secret June 10 meeting he held with prosecutors and Kenneth Copeland, a key state’s witness.
Whitaker said she will introduce herself to the jury, inform them that Glanville is fine and tell them not to concern themselves with the fact that there’s a new judge. But several experts who have been following the high-profile trial say that could be difficult, especially if any of the jurors caught wind of what transpired over the past two months.
“It’s un-freaking-believable,” said Denise de La Rue, a Decatur-based jury and trial consultant. “I’ve never in my history of being involved in or observing trials seen anything like this.”
Copeland is expected to take the stand Monday to begin redoing some of his testimony but it’s unclear how forthcoming he will be. At a hearing last week, Whitaker asked Copeland whether he plans to cooperate.
“It depend on how I wake up,” Copeland told her.
Whitaker said she will ask the jury if they can put days of his testimony out of their minds.
“If there are jurors who are like, ‘no man, I just cannot do that. Once I hear it, I can’t unhear it’, then we can know that we can excuse those jurors,” Whitaker said. “I guess if it’s eight jurors that say that, then we might have a mistrial. Better to go ahead and figure out from the onset, as far as I’m concerned.”
Whitaker is basing her inquiry of the jury on a 2020 Georgia Supreme Court opinion that said the trial court ensured the defendant’s right to a fair trial by giving an “emphatic curative instruction and polling the jurors as to whether they were able to disregard” a witness’ testimony.
Credit: Miguel Martinez
Credit: Miguel Martinez
There are still 12 trial jurors and four alternates, but the lengthy gang and racketeering trial is expected to continue through the first quarter of 2025. State prosecutors have called 75 witnesses so far and say they have about 100 more.
De La Rue said regardless of what instructions the judge gives, Whitaker cannot stop the jurors from having questions about what occurred since they were last in court. If they are kept in the dark about certain facts, de La Rue said they may try to fill in those blanks with what makes sense to them.
“And whether those answers are erroneous or on the mark, either way it influences how they view the evidence in the case,” she said. “I think it’s next to impossible that one or many of them have not heard during this eight weeks some or most of what’s going on.”
During the trial, Glanville had warned jurors daily to refrain from media coverage of the case or talking about the case with family and friends. But other experts agree it would be naive to think that no members of the jury have heard anything about the case in the last two months.
“In theory, the jurors don’t know what happened. In reality, they’ve all been texted by all their family members,” said Andrew Fleischman, an Atlanta trial and appellate lawyer who has closely watched the case. “They’re all getting clips in their email. There’s just no way that’s not happening.”
Georgia NAACP President Gerald Griggs was a defense attorney during the Atlanta Public Schools cheating trial, the second-longest trial in Georgia history. He said it’s impossible for the jury not to have heard or seen something on social media. During the APS trial, Griggs said attorneys would request that the judge ask jurors if they had seen anything on the news or heard about the case.
“My hope is that the defendants’ lawyers are doing that in this case,” he said. APS, which was the longest trial in Georgia’s history before YSL, lost jurors during the eight months of proceedings. Griggs said it was always a concern that they might lose jurors as the case continued to drag on.
Chuck Boring, the former director of Georgia’s Judicial Qualifications Commission, said it will be “shocking” for them to meet the new judge after a year and a half with Glanville on the bench.
“They’re probably going to have more questions in their heads than they’re going to ask out loud,” he said.
