RICO — often used to fight mafia — enables Fani Willis to identify a group of people working toward a common goal, as part of an “enterprise,” to engage in patterns of illegal activities.
State and federal prosecutors have found that they can use RICO laws to effectively make such arguments, and Willis has done it before. So has Rudy Giuliani, one of the defendants, who made his name trying racketeering cases against mafia families decades ago as a federal prosecutor in New York.
Another potential pitfall for a big RICO case is that it may become too complex for jurors to follow. As Michael J. Moore, the former U.S. attorney for the Middle District of Georgia, put it Monday night: “When you fish with too big a net, you risk getting tangled up yourself.” In Georgia, RICO is a felony charge that carries stiff penalties: a potential prison term of five to 20 years, a fine or both.
In the 2013 case, a group of Atlanta educators were accused of inflating standardized test scores and giving a false sense of academic progress. At the time, there was concern that the state was applying a law known for targeting the mob to a group of modestly paid public schoolteachers, most of whom were Black.
The indictment charges that members of the group, known as YSL, committed the crime of conspiracy to violate the RICO act, and that certain members are responsible for crimes such as murder, aggravated assault and armed robbery. Defense attorneys maintain that the group is merely a musical collective.
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