The new judge in Young Thug’s vast Atlanta gang trial has dismissed the rapper’s latest request to be released from jail. He will stay in jail until a verdict is reached.
Two weeks after becoming the third judge to preside over the massive racketeering case, Judge Paige Reese Whitaker rejected Thug’s attorney Brian Steel’s requests to release the rapper on bond and place him under home arrest with rigorous surveillance.
Steel had argued that the recent stormy events in the case — Judge Ural Glanville was ordered removed from the case after a private meeting with prosecutors and a crucial witness — constituted the type of “changed circumstances” that would allow her to reverse earlier orders that had kept him imprisoned.
Thug, real name Jeffery Williams, and hundreds of others were prosecuted in May 2022 on claims that their Young Stoner Life record company was actually a violent Atlanta gang called Young Slime Life. Using Georgia’s Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations (RICO) law, prosecutors believe the organization ran a criminal business that perpetrated murders, carjackings, armed robberies, drug selling, and other crimes over a decade.
The trial began in January 2023, but has been repeatedly delayed and disrupted, including an extraordinary 10-month jury selection process, the stabbing of another defendant, and now the departure of the presiding judge. Prosecutors have just presented a portion of their extensive list of potential witnesses, and the case is projected to last well into 2025.
Thug has been in jail for more than two years while the slow-moving trial drags on, and Glanville has repeatedly denied him bond due to concerns that he may intimidate witnesses. However, with Glanville gone, Steel argued this week that Thug should not be “languishing in the county jail” under “tortuous” conditions because he has not been convicted of a crime.
He reiterated his pleas to Whitaker during Tuesday’s session. “Mr. Williams has been in custody since the 9th day of May, 2022,” Steel informed the court. “He had sat through months of useless jury selection, which included over 2,000 people when the jurors were chosen from the first 511. That shouldn’t be on him. That is excessive. He has already been sitting here for a month, while Judge Glanville and [prosecutors] have allowed him to wander in squalor in a jail.”
Though Whitaker refused Thug’s second plea for release, the new judge indicated during the hearing that she would expedite the case, ordering prosecutors to better prepare their scheduled witness testimony and evidence, adding, “It should not take another seven months.”
The judge is also reviewing whether the lawsuit should proceed at all. Thug and three other YSL defendants have filed for a mistrial, citing Glanville’s conduct and other concerns with the case.
Whitaker refused two of those petitions during Tuesday’s hearing, including one that claimed a new judge could not “make informed rulings” after missing the first 19 months of a trial in which over 100 witnesses had testified. But she left two outstanding, including Steel’s claims that Glanville’s actions had permanently harmed the case.
Source: Billboard