A defense attorney in the trial of a famous rapper asked Judge Ural Glanville on Wednesday to recuse himself from the case over allegations the judge tampered with a witness. Glanville denied his request on the spot.
It was the latest twist in Young Thug’s trial, which has transformed into a drama playing out in Georgia’s Fulton County Superior Court about allegations of a corrupt judge, the arrest of the rapper’s attorney, and the prospect of a mistrial in a complex racketeering case eating up enormous public resources.
Controversy surrounding the case escalated this week after Glanville charged Young Thug’s attorney Brian Steel with contempt as Steel was actively defending his client in the courtroom.
Below is a look at how the case began and what happened this week that put Glanville under an intense spotlight.
The case against Young Thug
Young Thug, a Grammy-winning rapper whose legal name is Jeffrey Williams, was indicted in May 2022 on gang-related charges under the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act.
Young Thug and 27 co-defendants were hit with a slew of felonies in addition to the RICO charge, including murder, armed robbery, and illegal possession of firearms.
The rapper, for his part, is facing nine charges, which include the RICO violation, participation in criminal street gang activity, and possession of drugs and weapons.
Young Thug has been incarcerated in Cobb County Jail since his indictment and is alleged to have led the gang Young Slime Life, or YSL. YSL Records is also the name of Williams’s record label.
The drawn-out trial began last November, but the case was dragging on even before that as it saw various motions to sever, guilty pleas, and a difficult 10-month jury selection process.
When the trial finally did begin, the number of co-defendants had been whittled down to six. All have pleaded not guilty to their charges.
Law & Crime has been livestreaming the trial.
The case is one of two high-profile RICO cases that has devolved in District Attorney Fani Willis’s jurisdiction. The other, an election interference case brought against former President Donald Trump, is on hold indefinitely as an appellate court weighs accusations that Willis had an irreversible conflict of interest due to her past romantic relationship with a prosecutor.
Chaos in the courtroom
The mayhem this week in Young Thug’s trial centered on testimony from Kenneth Copeland, one of prosecutors’ key witnesses in the case.
Copeland agreed to testify against Young Thug in exchange for immunity, but when he took the stand to testify last week, he opted not to answer questions and instead pointed to the Fifth Amendment.
Steel, Young Thug’s attorney, revealed on Monday that he found out Glanville and state prosecutors met with Copeland behind closed doors — in what is known as an “ex parte” setting, which excludes the other parties in the case — and pressured Copeland to testify by threatening to charge him with perjury if he did not.
It is a violation of Georgia’s Code of Judicial Conduct for a judge to have an ex parte meeting about “substantive matters,” such as pushing a witness to testify.
But what raised more alarm than the meeting was Glanville’s reaction when he was confronted about it.
When Steel raised concerns about Glanville and prosecutors employing “coercion and witness intimidation” tactics, the judge did not address the meeting directly but rather demanded to know how Steel had found out about it and threatened him with contempt of court.
“How did you get this information?” Glanville asked. “If you don’t tell me how you got this information then you and I are gonna have some problems.”
After Steel refused to reveal his source, the judge ordered he be taken into custody and police escorted Steel out of the courtroom.
Attorneys rally behind Young Thug lawyer
Attorney Ashleigh Merchant, who was at the forefront of the effort to oust Willis from Trump’s trial, entered the picture on Tuesday and asked Glanville to clarify his contempt charges against Steel.
When Glanville responded that he held Steel in criminal contempt, Merchant noted the judge skipped all due process protocol that criminal contempt would normally require.
Merchant, the president of the Georgia Association Criminal Defense Lawyers, told the judge that roughly two dozen other attorneys wanted to appear as a “strike force” with her at the courthouse in support of Steel, but the judge said room would not allow it. Merchant then settled for one additional attorney to appear with her.
Steel is appealing the contempt order, and on Wednesday, the Supreme Court of Georgia granted him the ability to pay bond instead of report to jail while his appeal is pending.
Meanwhile, another defense attorney named Doug Weinstein asked Glanville to recuse himself from the case on Wednesday.
“Don’t you want to get rid of the cloud above the case right now?” Weinstein asked.
Glanville immediately denied the motion and then denied Weinstein’s follow-up request that he be granted a certificate to file for review of Glanville’s decision.
Steel had previously called for a mistrial in the case over the ex parte fiasco, and Glanville also denied that.
The events that have unfolded in the trial over the past week have dominated headlines in Georgia, stunned legal experts, and even attracted the attention of social media influencers.
Georgia-based defense attorney Andrew Fleischman indicated that Glanville appeared intent on keeping the trial going despite the chaos and said his removal would be necessary before a mistrial could occur.
“What we’ve seen so far is enough to grant a new trial on appeal,” Fleischman said. “But whether there is a mistrial will depend entirely on whether this judge remains because he has made it clear that no mistrial request will be granted.”
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Anthony Michael Kreis, a constitutional law professor at Georgia State University, told the New York Times after Steel confronted Glanville that the chain of events was a “complete circus” and “straight out of Law & Order.”
“So often I have to disabuse people of the notion that court is like those shows, but yesterday the dramatics just overshadowed everything and that’s really not helpful to the process,” Kreis said.
