Legal

When Young Thug went free Thursday (Oct. 31) after more than two years in custody, it didn’t come out of nowhere. It was the crescendo of a series of events that started months ago, transforming an endless, oft-delayed trial into a moment of catharsis for the superstar artist.
In June, the trial against Young Thug’s alleged “YSL” gang had been churning along for more than a year, stretching across 10 months of jury selection and five months of testimony. As the prosecutors worked through a vast list of witnesses, there was no clear end in sight — the trial was expected to run well into 2025, but even that was just a guess.

By this week, the state was handing out plea deals to multiple defendants, including offering one to Thug that would have sent him home immediately. He refused to take it, and his attorneys felt bold enough to simply plead guilty and hope the judge would set him free — a gamble that paid off.

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After a whirlwind week, it’s worth asking the question: How on earth did we get here?

The story starts on June 10, when Thug’s attorney Brian Steel made a stunning revelation in open court. He said he had learned of a secret “ex parte” meeting between Judge Ural Glanville, prosecutors and a key witness named Kenneth Copeland, and claimed that it warranted a mistrial.

Up to that point, Glanville’s handling of the case had resulted in an exceptionally slow pace. Though a sprawling racketeering case against many defendants was always going take time, the Glanville approach — featuring an unprecedented 10-month jury-selection process, repeated “comfort breaks,” and other delays in testimony — had put the case on pace to be the longest in state history.

At the June hearing, Steel alleged far more than bad pacing by Judge Glanville. He claimed that during the secret meeting, Glanville had helped prosecutors coerce the uncooperative Copeland into testifying with threats of extended jail time, all without notifying defense counsel.

The revelation set into motion case-changing events. Rather than addressing Steel’s concerns, Glanville repeatedly demanded to know who had told him about the meeting. When Steel refused to do so, the judge held him in criminal contempt and sentenced him to jail time — a ruling that was later overturned on appeal.

In the weeks that followed, Glanville repeatedly maintained that the ex parte meeting had been proper. But amid a barrage of demands that he either declare a mistrial or step aside, he finally referred the issue to another a judge to decide whether he could continue presiding over the trial.

On July 15, Judge Rachel Krause said that he could not. Though she ruled that the meeting did not appear to have been illegal, the judge ruled that Glanville would be removed from the case in order to preserve “the public’s confidence in the judicial system.”

That ruling punted the case to Judge Paige Reese Whitaker, a Fulton County jurist with a reputation for efficiency. She quickly showed why: On her first day on the bench, Whitaker said she wanted to pick up the pace, demanding that prosecutors be more organized in how they were presenting witnesses and testimony. “It should not take another seven months,” Whitaker said at that hearing.

By late September, Whitaker appeared to have reached her wits’ end with the prosecutors trying the case. Visibly frustrated at a Sept. 30 hearing, the judge blasted Chief Deputy DA Adriane Love and other government attorneys for “poor lawyering,” saying that their “haphazard” approach was making the trial more difficult for everyone involved.

“It is baffling to me that somebody with the number of years of experience that you have, time after time after time, continues to seemingly and purposefully hide the ball to the extent you possibly can, for as long as you possibly can,” Whitaker said. “I really don’t want to believe that it is purposeful but honestly, after a certain number of times, you start to wonder how can it be anything but that.”

Weeks later, that same “haphazard” approach led to an incident that set the stage for Thug’s eventual release

During witness testimony on Oct. 23, prosecutors were questioning a witness named Wunnie Lee (aka Slimelife Shawty), a former defendant in the YSL case who signed a plea agreement in exchange for testifying.

While on the stand, prosecutors asked Lee to identify certain defendants by showing him social media posts. While reading one of the posts, Lee read aloud the hashtag #freequa — a reference to a previous prison sentence for Marquavius Huey (aka Qua), one of Thug’s current co-defendants.

That was a crucial error by prosecutors. The jury was not supposed to know which defendants had previously been incarcerated, and defense attorneys argued that the government was supposed to redact the post and prep Lee not to mention it. After the admission before jurors, defense attorneys quickly moved for a mistrial. “We’re not going to be able to unring this bell,” one said.

The misstep quickly drew another sharp critique from Whitaker, who at one point told prosecutors that she was trying to find a way to “fix your sloppiness so that everybody won’t have wasted 10 to 12 months of their lives in this trial.” Though she refused to grant a mistrial that would permanently end the case, Whitaker warned that she might order that the massive trial be started over from scratch.

Faced with that disastrous prospect, prosecutors and defense attorneys quickly began talking about plea deals. Nobody wanted a mistrial: The DA’s office had already sunk years of taxpayer dollars into the costly case, and defendants had already sat in jail for years waiting for a verdict.

Days later, three of Young Thug’s co-defendants — Quamarvious Nichols, Marquavius “Qua” Huey and Rodalius “Lil Rod” Ryan — all reached deals with prosecutors. Two others — Deamonte “Yak Gotti” Kendrick and Shannon Stillwell — who are facing some of the most serious accusations in the case, refused to do so.

Like the other defense attorneys, Thug’s attorneys (Steel and co-counsel Keith Adams) hunkered down with prosecutors over the week to negotiate a potential deal. But at a press conference Thursday, Adams said the DA’s office did not approach the talks in “good faith” and appeared to only be trying to “save face.” Though they offered to let Thug escape the case with only 15 years probation and no prison time, Adams said they also insisted on onerous conditions in which Thug would affirm the state’s accusations against him.

With a judge that had shown herself to be highly skeptical of the prosecutors trying the case, Steel said Thursday that Thug and his legal team made the “excruciating” decision to plead guilty without a negotiated sentence — and to place their faith in Judge Whitaker for a lenient sentence.

“Negotiations totally broke down with the district attorney’s office, horribly broke down,” Steel told reporters. “At that point we believed that justice could be found with the honorable court. Jeffery just wanted to go home.”

The move was extremely risky. Prosecutors promptly told the judge that, in the absence of a negotiated plea deal, they were seeking a draconian sentence against Thug: a whopping 45 years, 25 of which would be served in prison and 20 more on probation.

After that, both Steel and Thug addressed the court, offering impassioned pleas for a light sentence. But before Whitaker handed down her sentence — just 15 years probation, allowing Thug to go home that day — she seemed most swayed by the conduct of the prosecutors themselves.

“It is not lost on the court that the state … was willing to entirely dismiss [several counts] and was willing to give a sentence that permitted Mr. Williams to walk out of the door today,” the judge said. “[The state] does not seem to be particularly worried that Mr. Williams, if on the streets, would be a danger to society.”

Following the sentence, Thug hugged his lawyers. By late Thursday evening, he had been released.