Lack of review snags hundreds arrested by now-disbanded task force

BRUNSWICK, Ga. — When Glynn County Superior Court Judge Roger B. Lane declared five Glynn County police officers impeached witnesses, defense attorneys did not foresee that in a matter of weeks the officers’ elite drug task force would be disbanded and cops would be indicted for misconduct.

The unraveling of the Glynn Brunswick Narcotics Enforcement Team (GBNET) in 2019 threatened the reputations of senior officers who had overseen more than 2,500 arrests in a nine-year period. Yet it also created a chance for defendants and their lawyers to demand that cases built on corrupt police work be thrown out. 

“I had no idea what was going to come out of it. It turned into something a lot bigger than I thought,” said Willliam Johnson, who managed the public defenders’ office at the time and helped dismiss charges in 15 cases.

Nearly five years later, that opportunity remains theoretical for many. Hundreds of potentially compromised cases never got a second look due to forces in the county that trapped defendants in a legal Bermuda Triangle with no one to advocate for them, or any way to discover whether their prosecutions could be reviewed, according to an investigation by The Current. 

Stacked against them was a prosecution machine designed to accelerate plea deals ahead of evidence disclosure that had helped prevent police misconduct from coming to light; a drug lab backlog that could take six months to process evidence, and poor defendants represented by an under resourced public defender’s office who had to choose between waiting in jail or pleading guilty and getting probation, without knowing the details of the case against them. 

Finally, and perhaps most importantly, the vagaries of Georgia law allow a wide latitude for prosecutors to decide whether to re-examine closed cases when police malfeasance is later discovered.

How so many potentially compromised cases were forgotten hinged on then-District Attorney Jackie Johnson’s response to a second order by Judge Lane for an index of cases by the same five officers and three confidential informants. Lane asked for these lists after hearing court testimony that an officer was determined to be having a sexual relationship with two informants, a fact that his superiors ignored. 

DA Johnson compiled lists of more than 500 cases. But instead of a proactive review, she only sent two general letters to the county’s lawyers that cases could be tainted. Neither she nor her office contacted these defendants individually.

State rules for prosecuting attorneys say that the responsibility of notifying defendants in instances of police misconduct lies with the prosecution. But the same code states that if a defendant has representation, the prosecution is prohibited from contacting them directly. 

What DA Johnson ignored was that 99% of cases flagged for potential review were individuals whose cases had ended in a plea deal, and approximately 85% of them were represented by a public defender, according to records examined by The Current. 

In Georgia, a defendant who enters a guilty plea signs away their right to appeal. Moreover, once that plea is recorded, the defendant no longer is entitled to a public defender. That meant hundreds of individuals on the DA’s lists had no legal representation at the time.

“A prosecutor has the duty to inform the person they prosecuted,” said Wrix McIlvaine, a Brunswick criminal defense attorney who helped successfully get one client’s charges dropped as a result of the GBNET scandal.

Although individuals from the 2019 lists and others might be eligible for legal relief, the time frame for them to take advantage of this possibility could be ending, making the legacy of GBNET police misconduct a potentially permanent stain on their records.

Avalanche for public defenders

In America’s criminal justice system, public defenders represent clients who cannot afford their own legal representation and are tasked with defending people accused of a variety of criminal charges. 

In William Johnson’s office, high caseloads are part of the job. From 2014 to 2020, the five public defenders on the Brunswick Judicial Circuit handled over 17,000 cases and covered five counties: Glynn, Camden, Appling, Wayne, and Jeff Davis. 

McIlvaine, who was a public defender for three years before going into private practice in 2010, says that while he was working in the Brunswick office representing indigent clients his case loads were often twice as high as the American Bar Association standard of 125 cases per year.

The robust amount of charges stemming from GBNET police work made public defenders’ jobs even more difficult. The unit chalked up more than 2,500 arrests from 2011 to 2019, when it was disbanded.

In a review of thousands of court records related to the cases flagged by the DA, The Current’s analysis shows that as many as three or four public defenders sometimes were substituted on a single case. 

That hectic pace contributed to the continual difficulties inherent in a public defender’s job. “There’s no way every little nuance like that will be remembered or shared. And so little things can slip through the cracks,” said McIlvaine.

“You know, there’s a trial in one courtroom. There’s drug court in the other courtroom. It could be that you’ve got clients in every single court, and there’s only so many public defenders to cover it,” McIlvaine added.

The grueling amount of work, coupled with sparse budgets, left some public defenders feeling outgunned by the DA’s office, described Meredyth Yoon, another former Brunswick public defender. Resource disparity, she said, is “a systemic problem,” which gives the prosecution an advantage and affects the ability of defense counsel to provide a robust defense.

Those who take on the job consider it a calling. “The public defender’s office is people who believe in the work and care about what they’re doing. They believe in the defense,” said McIlvaine. 

McIlvaine accepted a judicial appointment in October last year and now works as a municipal court judge. He is running for county solicitor.

Rare reviews successful

At the start of 2019, William Johnson was managing the public defenders’ office when he filed a motion to protect the rights of Gary Whittle. The Brunswick man had pleaded guilty to drug-related charges stemming from police work by a GBNET officer who was the target of an internal affairs investigation. Court hearings through the spring of the year brought much of the police malfeasance to light.

Judge Roger Lane ruled in Whittle’s favor in a blistering decision that branded five GBNET officers unreliable witnesses and found multiple constitutional violations related to witness credibility and suppression of evidence under Giglio and Brady. Given the wide-ranging implications of Judge Lane’s ruling, defense lawyers in the county expected prosecutors to step up and re-evaluate the hundreds of convictions associated with those officers.

Then-District Attorney Jackie Johnson never did. 

In an effort to preserve other clients’ rights, William Johnson and his team filed nine extraordinary motions for a new trial in a day for clients whose cases shared similarities to Whittle’s. The charges they faced ranged from possession of cocaine and methamphetamine to selling narcotics, all felonies, and their arrests also came from work by the officers named in Judge Lane’s ruling. 

Hundreds of other defendants who had previously been represented by the public defender’s office had no such luck. Their representation had ended at the conclusion of their case. 

When the District Attorney sent out her two missives in June and July 2019 notifying the lawyers of the case lists, these court files would have shown that the vast majority of people on the lists had no attorney of record. Public defenders, therefore, had no reason to pass her communication to their former clients.

The result is that most of the people on the flagged lists did not have any way to discover that they had the possibility of legal relief.

The situation revealed a problem in Glynn County that had been hiding in plain sight: Grand jury testimony described a prosecutorial “fast-track program” that DA Johnson’s office used to secure convictions via plea deals for GBNET indictments. 

This conviction production line is part of a larger pattern in the U.S. According to the American Bar Association, plea bargains account for almost 98% of federal convictions and 95% of state convictions. In Glynn County, the GBNET cases flagged by the DA’s office resulted in even higher percentages.

“Many more people are arrested and jailed than can possibly go to trial within a functioning court system, in Glynn County and in general,” said Yoon.

In GBNET’s case, officers would routinely receive warrants using confidential informants who were tainted witnesses, according to grand jury testimony and police internal affairs reports. For years, multiple police officers misused CIs and violated police procedures intended to ensure evidence was gathered at the highest level of trust. 

‘I cannot believe an elected District Attorney would allow a program like that to grow and be implemented in their office.’

Ryan Ralson, veteran Georgia investigator

Yet during a plea negotiation, defense attorneys would not always have access to full case files, lab tests or crime reports, a fact that kept years of police wrongdoing from being understood, according to The Current’s 15-month investigation of these files.

A veteran Georgia investigator who reviewed The Current’s data said such policing and prosecutorial culture foster corruption. “I cannot believe an elected District Attorney would allow a program like that to grow and be implemented in their office,” said Ryan Ralson, who spent most of his 17-year law enforcement career working in greater Atlanta.

The disadvantage continues for defendants facing drug charges. Those waiting in jail before trial are “the most vulnerable to plea offers for probation that occur before there is an independent investigation and scientifically valid drug testing,” says Professor Elizabeth Taxel, the director of the Criminal Defense Practicum at the University of Georgia School of Law. “In these situations, discovery exchange and review is often very limited.”

Part of the reason public defenders resorted to plea deals in Glynn County was due to systemic backlogs in crime lab work in south Georgia, according to William Johnson. Drugs in evidence can sit for six months to a year before being tested, and state labs only test a portion of the alleged narcotics seized in an arrest. Despite that, prosecutors commonly level charges for the full volume of suspected illegal matter seized during an arrest.

Clients who can’t afford or don’t make bond don’t want to sit in jail for months to have a test result that may or may not work in their favor, said Johnson.

Convictions can frequently result without anybody ever questioning the state’s evidence, explained Taxel.

State law restricts handling of cases

In the wake of the Whittle ruling, state laws kept public defenders from championing the individuals whose cases had been flagged by the DA as an entire class of cases.

In 2019, Johnson’s team of public defenders had to triage. They moved to preserve the rights of the largest number of current clients that they could. According to state law, that meant prioritizing people sentenced to prison on drug charges during that current term of court, which lasted March to September 2019.

The public defenders filed motions for nine clients who had been sentenced to prison for the sale and possession of cocaine or meth. Not all of them wanted to reopen their cases, because they didn’t trust they would receive a fair hearing, despite the new evidence of police misconduct. In total, 15 cases on the lists based on the order in the Whittle hearings were successful. 

Although three police officers have been convicted of wrongdoing and five impeached as witnesses in the 2019 Whittle ruling, the current Brunswick-area DA Keith Higgins says he has no plans to review convictions based on GBNET investigations, citing a lack of resources. 

Without prosecutors taking action, there is no easy avenue for most of the individuals on the DA lists to seek legal relief. 

Defendants on the lists signed plea agreements stating that they “knowingly give up and intentionally waive” the right to an appeal in a criminal court. When a defendant enters a guilty plea they only have 30 days to file a notice of an appeal. In Georgia, there is no exception made to this time requirement in cases involving police wrongdoing, according to Prof. Taxel. After the 30 days have passed a defendant’s only remedy is to file a civil suit or an Extraordinary Motion for New Trial. 

A civil suit such as a writ of habeas corpus is a separate avenue, said Savannah-based defense lawyer Michael Schwartz. Georgia law is unclear about whether this option is available for all potential cases of GBNET misconduct. Habeas petitions must be filed within four years once the suppressed evidence becomes known. “Ultimately, this new date would be a factual determination made by a judge, ” says Taxel, “ however, it’s possible that a judge would consider Judge Lane’s order or the prosecution of the GBNET officers as the date in which this new clock starts ticking.”

The right to an attorney as afforded by the constitution does not extend to a civil appeal. So to file this type of suit, those on the DA lists would need to employ a lawyer to represent them, or find a lawyer ready to work pro bono. Schwartz says he is willing to represent such individuals. 

If a lawyer filed an “Extraordinary Motion for a New Trial,” this motion would have to be brought before a District Attorney to approve. 

Higgins, who is running for re-election and faces a primary vote in May, says his office would be open to receiving and handling those motions.

Type of Story: Investigative

In-depth examination of a single subject requiring extensive research and resources.