In 2020 Glynn County became part of Georgia’s conversation about racial injustice after Ahmaud Arbery was murdered by three white vigilantes and local police officers dismissed the hate crime as a justified shooting. Lost in the anger and outrage about that tragedy, a separate police scandal was forgotten.
A year earlier the county’s elite anti-drugs police unit — Glynn Brunswick Narcotics Enforcement Team — had been disbanded. A judge had ordered an index of cases based on police work of five officers after hearing court testimony that unit members were using drugs and having sex with informants, as well as violating other police policies. Three cops eventually pleaded guilty. The police chief is fighting charges that he covered up misconduct, and the former Brunswick-area district attorney is facing a separate trial.
In the vacuum of any oversight, The Current spent 15 months looking at the cases involving approximately 450 people flagged by the DA but who were never informed about an opportunity for legal relief.
We wanted to examine how Glynn County’s judicial system chose to treat the tainted GBNET cops compared to those caught in the web of the unit.
Reporter Caitlin Philippo spent hundreds of hours in the Glynn County Superior Clerk’s office examining thousands of documents from cases which had been flagged by the DA’s lists. Our team made dozens of public records requests from the police, state and county judicial departments, and spoke with more than a dozen criminal law experts, including those who teach future prosecutors and criminal defense attorneys at the University of Georgia School of Law.
Unlike in many court systems across the United States, court records at the Glynn County Superior Clerk’s office are not online for free public access. Philippo had to read each file in person and The Current paid for copies of each document.
We then digitized these documents and created our own library of information, and spreadsheets. Along with data reporter Maggie Lee, the two journalists then analyzed patterns and similarities in arrests, indictments, evidence and convictions.
Philippo also reached out to defendants on the lists, lawyers who represented those clients, prosecutors, and more than a dozen legal and investigative experts to determine why more hadn’t been done in the face of proven police misconduct.
Philippo filed Georgia open records requests for police records to determine how informants were used, and how critical a role police narrative played in an eventual conviction.
She discussed the cases with the Georgia Innocence Project and other attorneys focused on social justice in order to gain a better understanding of the law and scope affected.
And finally: we expanded our search from the cases that the DA’s office had indexed to include cases from officers named in the original judge’s order which prosecutors had ignored.
Technical methodology
The Current started its data analysis with the two lists of cases that the Brunsick District Attorney’s office in response to a Glynn County Superior Court order to compile lists of cases spanning a two-year period worked on by five GBNET officers, including James Cassada, and three confidential informants. A third list was uncovered during our investigation.
The inclusion or exclusion of charges, sentences, release dates, and lawyers of record differed across the three lists.
Dozens of list items lacked basic information like case numbers and there were dozens of duplicate entries. Co-defendants were sometimes listed together and sometimes separately.
We combined the three lists in Excel spreadsheet software, standardized the columns, set up columns for last name and first name, alphabetized the names and disaggregated co-defendants into separate lines in the spreadsheet. We filled in blank spots with information from deep inside tens of thousands of pages of court documents.
At least 459 unique individuals were prosecuted one or more times, or were involved in a civil case from 2011 through 2019. Another two people may be in the records, but there’s not enough publicly available information to resolve whether they are duplicates of people with similar names who are already counted. We excluded those two unconfirmed people from our demographic graphs, which portray only the 459 confirmed unique individuals.
There are a total 511 records portrayed in our graphs on charges, sentences and civil cases.
A record was counted in the 511 if we found enough unique information to distinguish it from some other record.
For example, if two records had different case numbers but the same name, those are counted as two unique cases but one unique person.
Or if two records concerned the same person but with different charges, we counted each record separately.
Where two people were listed under the same case number as co-defendants, we separated the defendants and counted each co-defendant’s charge and sentence separately.
We excluded from the analysis about three dozen exact duplicate records where the case number, defendant name, charge and outcome were identical.