The final defendant pleaded guilty in the yearslong gang prosecution centered on Atlanta rapper Young Thug, closing out a case that started with tough talk by Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis and ended, as one victim’s mother said, “a long way from justice.”
It’s been more than three years since Willis stood in front of television cameras and said she would use Georgia’s powerful Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act to go after the alleged Young Slime Life gang, which she said was behind a slew of shootings and homicides that wreaked havoc across Atlanta for a decade.
On Monday, Christian Eppinger, one of 28 people charged in the sprawling racketeering case, pleaded guilty to attempted murder in the 2022 shooting of an Atlanta police officer. Footage of Eppinger shooting Officer David Rodgers six times was played in court as Rodgers looked on, along with about three dozen other APD officers who attended the hearing.
Eppinger, 25, also pleaded guilty to a host of other counts, including armed robbery, theft by taking, gun charges and conspiring to violate the state’s RICO Act. He was sentenced to 75 years, to serve 40, but that runs concurrent with 45 years he’s already serving.
Credit: Jason Getz / Jason.Getz@ajc.com
Credit: Jason Getz / Jason.Getz@ajc.com
Eppinger’s plea caps off a saga that legal observers have called an “embarrassment,” a “circus” and a loss for everyone involved. Willis did not get a single murder conviction out of the prosecution, and the only two defendants to make it all the way through a jury trial were acquitted of the harshest charges they faced.
In that trial, marred by lengthy delays, tense courtroom drama and the ouster of Fulton’s chief judge midway through, several Atlanta attorneys said the state’s evidence largely took a backseat.
“The only thing I remember about the case is what an embarrassment it was to the Georgia justice system,” said defense attorney Amanda Clark Palmer, who was not involved in the case. “It was so unbelievable and so circus-like and so out of control.”
Credit: Steve Schaefer
Credit: Steve Schaefer
Of the 28 people initially charged in the indictment, 19 ended up pleading guilty, including Young Thug, the Grammy-winning rapper who prosecutors alleged was the co-founder and leader of the YSL gang. Another defendant was found guilty of a single gun charge.
Heading into the trial, Shawonna Edmond said she was optimistic the people responsible for her son’s death in a 2015 drive-by shooting would finally be held accountable.
Before bringing the charges, Willis promised Edmond prosecutors would try to get justice in the 2015 killing of Donovan Thomas outside an Atlanta barbershop.
The death of Thomas, who authorities said was a ranking member of the rival Inglewood Family gang, allegedly sparked a yearslong feud between the two groups and retaliatory shootings across the city. Willis said his targeted killing “created violence like Atlanta has never seen.”
One of the vehicles used in the deadly shooting had been rented by Young Thug, prosecutors said.
Credit: Contributed
Credit: Contributed
But Edmond was stunned last week when, unbeknownst to her, the final defendant charged with her son’s murder was allowed to plead guilty to a reduced count of aggravated assault.
“I voiced my opinion. I told them, ‘You guys have really put a dagger in my heart. You let me down,’” said Edmond, who sat through a year of grueling testimony. “I did not know that last defendant was going to walk away with aggravated assault.”
She said the prosecutors were apologetic and that she appreciated their efforts, but now she must cope with the fact that nobody was convicted of murder in her son’s shooting death a decade ago.
“They know I’m not happy,” she said, calling the final outcome “a long way from justice.”
Some of the officers in court for Eppinger’s sentencing Monday were also unhappy with the outcome, grumbling in the courthouse hallway that the result, which added effectively zero additional jail time, was a “terrible sentence.”
One police sergeant, Will Johnson, who was a detective with the Atlanta Police Department’s gang unit at the time of the shooting and witnessed it, told the AJC Eppinger was trying to execute the officer.
Credit: Jason Getz / Jason.Getz@ajc.com
Credit: Jason Getz / Jason.Getz@ajc.com
Johnson said he’d been deployed to four combat zones, “but this was the most traumatic event of my lifetime.”
Eppinger’s attorney Eric Johnson, meanwhile, said he’s grateful his client has a chance to eventually get out of prison and turn his life around.
“Mr. Eppinger is still a young man, so at some point he can get out and still move on,” the attorney said. He also said he’s grateful the case is finally over.
Young Thug, whose real name is Jeffery Williams, received 15 years probation after pleading guilty to gang, gun and drug charges on Halloween night. But some of the jurors forced to sit through the longest trial in state history said they likely would have acquitted the hip-hop superstar had he left his fate up to them.
Anthony Michael Kreis, a constitutional law professor at Georgia State University, said he frequently tuned in as the widely watched trial devolved into what he called a soap opera.
Attorneys bickered, defendants brought drugs to court, one lawyer was arrested and another was held in contempt after learning of an improper meeting between the judge and prosecutors.
There was also jailhouse violence, full frontal nudity on the monitors at a pretrial hearing and a prospective juror who was surveilled by prosecutors for a month because they didn’t believe he lived in the county. Then there was the romantic relationship that blossomed between a courthouse deputy and Eppinger, the final defendant to plead guilty in the case.
Credit: Arvin Temkar/AJC
Credit: Arvin Temkar/AJC
In the end, Kreis said it’s impossible to say that anyone truly received justice.
“Nothing about this went well for anybody,” he said.
He criticized the way the prosecution presented its case, saying the deluge of complicated and often irrelevant information dumped on jurors from Day 1 made it nearly impossible to follow.
“I stood there and said ‘What is this about?’” Kreis said. “I didn’t understand the story. I didn’t understand the narrative, … and I would like to think that I’m a reasonably intelligent person who has a deep understanding of the law.”
If attorneys are unable to decipher the evidence presented at trial, Kreis said, an average jury would certainly be left feeling “befuddled.”
“Then you throw on top of that the fact you’re asking these jurors to wade into this complicated case, the purpose of which has never really been articulated from the get-go, and you’re asking them to give up a year of their lives?” he said. “You’re never going to get a conviction from that.”
Despite going after what prosecutors said was a violent street gang responsible for years of shootings and homicides, none of the eight defendants accused of murder were convicted of that charge.
Willis’ office has argued that guilty pleas are convictions and the number of pleas from the case shows this was an effective prosecution.
“The District Attorney’s commitment to the community is to focus prosecutorial resources on the most dangerous offenders,” a spokesperson said in a statement Friday. He noted her “anti-gang initiative” has garnered more than 400 convictions, including the ones in the YSL case.
Credit: Jason Getz / Jason.Getz@ajc.com
Credit: Jason Getz / Jason.Getz@ajc.com
In a fiery interview last week with 11Alive, Willis said the attorneys who were critical of her work didn’t live in Fulton County and weren’t aware of the positive effects of her work.
“It was an amazing time,” she said of the case, citing the convictions she was able to land. “The community is safer.”
If taxpayers are unhappy with the sentences dealt out for the convictions she negotiated, “they should elect other judges,” Willis said.
She vowed to continue using the state’s racketeering statute to bring cases. Willis’ office has one pending high-profile RICO case, the election interference case against President Donald Trump that is currently awaiting a decision from the Georgia Supreme Court.
In that case, an appeals court ruled Willis cannot continue to oversee the litigation because of a conflict of interest. She is accused of hiring a romantic interest, Nathan Wade, to help prosecute the case. The Georgia Supreme Court is mulling whether to take on the issue or allow the appellate court’s ruling to stand.
Willis has declined repeated requests by The Atlanta Journal-Constitution for interviews about the YSL case.
Gabe Banks, a defense attorney and former Fulton County prosecutor who worked alongside Willis for years, said no single case defines a district attorney’s legacy.
“To the extent that there is some criticism about how she handled YSL, the reality is there are so many other things that she’s required to handle,” Banks said. “I just don’t know how one case will define her legacy. I don’t believe in that.”
He acknowledged the criticism Willis has received over her handling of YSL and the case against Trump, but said that comes with the territory.
“She’s doing a lot of good things in that office,” Banks said. “It’s a part of the job to get criticized, but I think she is going to do what she believes is right and she will continue to do that.”
Defense attorney Max Schardt, who represented Shannon Stillwell, said he wasn’t surprised there was no second trial and that prosecutors quickly resolved the remaining defendants’ cases.
He was one of several attorneys who argued there would have been far fewer guilty pleas had these men been allowed to post bond instead of sitting for months inside of Fulton County’s notoriously dangerous jail.
“This case, from my perspective, got off to a very rough start when it was just automatically assumed that none of these 28 individuals should receive a bond,” Schardt said.
Credit: arvin.temkar@ajc.com
Credit: arvin.temkar@ajc.com
Just one defendant, Miles Farley, was granted bond after his attorney was arrested for bringing a bottle of his prescription medication with him to court.
Schardt, who now represents a defendant in Georgia Attorney General Chris Carr’s racketeering case against Atlanta Public Safety Training Center protesters, said bringing a RICO indictment is fairly easy. The hard part, he said, is actually prosecuting it.
He said cases with large numbers of defendants clearly strain the system, and he questioned why prosecutors continue to bring them.
“They don’t need to be RICO,” he said. “You can just charge people for the crimes they’re accused of if you have the evidence.”
Kreis said regardless of what the prosecution says, there’s no way this was a victory for the DA’s office. Given the way the case was handled, he said neither the victims nor the defendants truly received justice, and he called that “an absolute tragedy.”
“It’s just sad all around because nobody won,” he said. “Absolutely everybody lost.”
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