Judge says $2,000 donation doesn't warrant recusal in Young Thug recusal flap
Judge Rachel Krause in Atlanta will consider whether to recuse her colleague Chief Judge Ural Glanville after a June 10 ex parte meeting with a key YSL trial witness.
A judge said Tuesday that a $2,000 campaign donation she received from a colleague doesn’t mean she can’t decide whether he can continue presiding over rapper Jeffery “Young Thug” Williams’ racketeering conspiracy trial.
“The Georgia Supreme Court has held that the mere fact of a campaign contribution to a judge — even from a party to the case — does not warrant recusal where the contribution was not exceptionally large,” according to the order from Fulton County Superior Court Judge Rachel Krause in Atlanta.
Williams’ lawyers Brian Steel and Keith Adams cited the money, which Glanville gave to Krause’s re-election campaign in April, in a supplement to their June 17 recusal motion. They also cited Krause’s position as a judicial officer in the same circuit court as Glanville, who is chief judge, and said “an appearance of impropriety exists.”
But Krause cited a court rule that specifies recusal motions considered by other judges be assigned randomly through the court’s case assignment program, which means the motion must go to another judge in the same circuit.
“This Court does not relish the task to which it has been assigned, but ‘[i]t is as much the duty of a judge not to grant the motion to recuse when the motion is legally insufficient as it is to recuse when the motion is meritorious,’” Judge Krause wrote, quoting a 2009 Georgia Supreme Court decision that said a trial court judge shouldn’t have been recused from a lawsuit against a county that was paying him $2,700 annually.
The judge also rejected a motion from attorneys for Williams’ co-defendant Deamonte Kendrick that sought to recuse all Fulton County Superior Court judges from deciding the Glanville recusal motions.
Krause has been a Fulton County Superior Court judge since January 2019. She earned her law degree in 2001 from Mercer Law School in Macon, Georgia, and worked in private practice for 20 years, including eight years as a partner in the Atlanta office of Lewis Brisbois Bisgaard & Smith LLP.
The trial before Judge Glanville began with jury selection in January 2023 and could go into 2026 at the rate testimony is going.
Williams, one of the biggest stars in hip-hop music, has been in jail without bail since May 2022 as prosecutors allege he led a decade-long organized crime spree through his Young Slime Life gang and Young Stoner Life record label. He and Kendrick are on trial with four co-defendants: Rodalius Ryan, Marquiavius Huey, Shannon Stillwell and Quamarvious Nichols. The indictment has 65 charges, including two counts of murder and three counts of attempted murder, and the racketeering conspiracy charge is supported by 191 overt acts that range from murder to lyrics from Williams’ songs.
Steel has been Williams’ go-to criminal defense lawyer for years, earning a shoutout in the 2018 song “Oh Okay” with rappers Lil Baby and Gunna, who was indicted alongside Williams under his legal name, Sergio Kitchens, but took an Alford plea and is not expected to testify in trial. He and his co-counsel Adams have mounted an aggressive defense that’s included frequent mistrial requests and allegations of prosecutorial misconduct that prosecutors have described are personal attacks. But their compalints took an even more dire tone after Judge Glanville met in secret on June 10 with prosecutors and Kenneth “Woody” Copeland, a key prosecution witness who was jailed for contempt of court.
Along with Glanville’s recusal, Steel’s and Adams’ supplemental filing on Monday calls for Chief Deputy District Attorney Adriane Love to be kicked off the case, along with Deputy District Attorney Simone Hylton.'
Both Love and Hylton participated in the June 10 meeting with Glanville and Copeland, who had been given immunity for his testimony in trial but he still defiantly tried to invoke his Fifth Amendment right against self incrimination when asked his age.
Glanville’s meeting with prosecutors, Copeland and Copeland’s lawyer focused on Copeland’s refusal to testify and subsequent jailing. The judge didn’t tell defense lawyers about the meeting, then when Steel confronted him about it during a break in Copeland’s testimony, he ordered the lawyer taken into custody for contempt of court after Steel refused to say who told him about it. Glanville ordered Steel to serve 20 days in jail in 10 weekend stints, but the Georgia Supreme Court stayed the sentence as he appeals the criminal contempt order.
Glanville initially refused to send the recusal motions against him to another judge, instead ruling that they didn’t meet the standard for transfer motions under Georgia law. But he changed course on July 1 and ordered the motions assigned to another judge. He also halted trial proceedings until the motions are decided.
Saying “time is of the essence” because of the halted trial, Krause gave prosecutors until Monday at 5 p.m. to respond to the recusal motions, but she extended the deadline by 48 hours on Monday at the request of Love, who said she was “unexpectedly called away from work after a medical emergency involving an immediate family member occurred.”
Kendrick’s lawyers Doug Weinstein, E. Jay Abt and and Katie Hingerty let their June 12 recusal motion stand, but Steel and Adams filed a supplement on Monday that pointed out Glanville’s donation to Krause’s re-election campaign. They also falsely said Krause donated $500 to Glanville’s 2024 re-election campaign, but they corrected the statement in another supplement on Tuesday.
Glanville’s $2,000 donation to Krause’s campaign was part of $167,750.19 she raised for her May 2024 re-election. Her top donation was $5,000 from businessman Roger Landry, followed by $3,300 donations from Fulton County Superior Court Judges Craig Schwall and Scott McAfee.
The filing refers to Krause as “the Honorable Judge Krause” but omits “honorable” for Glanville, Love and Hylton, instead calling them “Judge Glanville” “Lawyer Love” and Lawyer Hylton.” It also refers to them as “‘supposed’ public officials’” and says “Judge Glanville, lawyer Hylton and lawyer Love have a lot of explaining to do and must all be removed from this case except as a witness.”
“Judge Glanville, lawyer Love and lawyer Hylton have teamed up to conduct their illegal and unethical conduct outside of the view of Mr. Williams and his counsel, the public and outside of the lens of the cameras,” Steel and Adams wrote. “These ‘public officials’ shall never be trusted by Mr. Williams or undersigned counsel. There are serious consequences for these intentional and unjustified misdeeds that have not yet been dispensed.”
Steel and Adams also said in a footnote: “Undersigned counsel derives no happiness when filing this Supplemental Motion. However, let justice be done though the heavens fall. Actually, the heavens will not fall by unmasking biased and unethical members of the Bar.”
The 233-page filing includes a 12-page affidavit detailing the misconduct Steel and Adams believe occurred during the June 10 meeting, based on the court reporter’s transcript released last week. It says Glanville became “a member of the prosecution team” and misstated the law to Copeland when telling him he could be jailed for the duration of other defendants’ trials, not just the current trial. The judge and Hylton also “misstated the law of perjury and give promises of no prosecution,” according to the affidavit, and they are “necessary witnesses as Mr. Copeland confessed to them, ‘I did these crimes. I’m telling you that.’”
“Judge Glanville sat silent as lawyer Hylton told Mr. Copeland that he has spent enough time in prison for YSL,” according to the affidavit. “This is extra-judicial information to Judge Glanville that marks YSL as a criminal street gang, a material element of counts in the Indictment, including Count One–RICO. This statement marks that persons supposedly associated with YSL are guilty of criminality.”
Krause, a former BigLaw litigator, observed in her rejection order that only one footnote and one paragraph of the affidavit pertains to her recusal request. She also observed an apparently unusual method by Steel and Adams for requesting her recusal: Lodged in a supplemental filing to another recusal motion, with the two bases detailed in a footnote and “later, a lengthy Paragraph 52.”
I’ll send another email when prosecutors file their response to the recusal motions Wednesday afternoon.
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Court documents:
June 10 ex parte hearing transcript
June 12 Weinstein team’s motion to recuse Judge Glanville
June 12 Glanville rejects Weinstein team’s recusal motion
June 14 Kayla Bumpus’ motion to quash and recuse
June 17 Steel’s motion to recuse Glanville
June 20 Georgia Supreme Court petition re: Glanville
June 28 Fulton County emergency petition re: Glanville
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