Making Sense of the YSL Trial’s Wild Ending
Georgia prosecutors shocked the hip-hop community in May 2022 when they claimed that YSL Records, the label founded by Young Thug, was a criminal street gang under the state’s Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act. Legal scholars and rap fans alike criticized the case from the start, which ensnared 28 defendants, many ascendant Atlanta rappers among them. Now, two and a half years later, a jury refuted the prosecutors’ claim for the first time, finding two YSL defendants, Yak Gotti and Shannon Stillwell, not guilty on RICO charges. Both men were also acquitted of various murder, gang, gun, and drug charges, while Stillwell was found guilty on a firearm-possession charge and sentenced to time served.
The moment the verdict was read!
— THUGGERDAILY ひ (@ThuggerDaily) December 3, 2024
Yak Gotti: NOT GUILTY on all charges
Shannon: NOT GUILTY on charges except Count 64, firearm possession (time served) #YSLTRIAL pic.twitter.com/SyjNBoMkyT
The verdict brought a close to the longest criminal trial in Georgia history, which began in January 2023 and originally involved six YSL defendants. Four of those defendants made guilty pleas in October, including Young Thug, who pleaded no contest to the RICO charge and walked free on probation. The most recent not-guilty verdicts not only put those pleas in a different light, but also raise questions about the YSL defendants yet to stand trial — and how the Fulton County District Attorney’s Office has handled this case. Andrew Fleischman, an Atlanta defense attorney, has been a critic of Georgia’s broad RICO law since the beginning of the trial but isn’t optimistic things will change much.
As the not-guilty verdicts came down for these two defendants, what was your initial reaction?
What a tremendous win for these guys, who stuck to their guns, were willing to stay in jail, probably had probation-style offers on the table that they could have tried to take, and said no, they wanted a verdict instead.
Yak Gotti and Stillwell were both offered plea deals and turned them down. That looks like the right move now.
It does. I think the lawyers in this case were always confident they were going to win. They have access to something that we don’t: They got to see the jury’s body language responding to the arguments. It’s very likely the jury was unhappy about how little evidence they heard over that much time.
You’re approaching these verdicts from the perspective of the defense, but obviously, this is a big loss for Fulton County.
They’re going to spin it as a big win, though. They can get a press release where they talk about, “Look at all the guilty verdicts we secured. Justice was done. We got that one count of felony possession.” So yeah, I do take it as a big loss, but Fulton will not act like that at all.
This verdict came just as Judge Paige Reese Whitaker was starting hearings for some of the additional defendants who were severed from the case and are still waiting for trials. Do you think Fulton County is going to continue pursuing cases against those other YSL defendants?
Oh yeah. Maybe they’ll offer them generous plea terms. There’s a valuable strategic lesson for the state here, which is: Don’t try to eat something bigger than your head, put in a reasonable amount of evidence that goes directly towards the case, and don’t mash 17 co-defendants together. Maybe these other cases are winnable, but the original case really did proceed as though nobody had talked to the witnesses in years. Those prosecutors had not checked back up with people to see what they were thinking, so what the witnesses said was very surprising to them.
And that seemed to hurt the prosecution in terms of public perception of the case, because those moments — like Lil Woody’s messy testimony — then went viral.
There was no quality control over what came in, because you can’t when you have 200 witnesses on the list.
That’s something that’s been talked about a lot with this case: this trial being hurt by having six defendants and being so bloated. Do you think once it was down to these two defendants, that the state had a better chance at securing a guilty verdict, or was the damage already done from the early part of the trial?
The jury probably resented being there. And having the evidence against these men scattered over the course of a year in a totally haphazard way, it was very hard to hold onto what made sense and how the person was guilty.
I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: It really goes to show the RICO law needs to be reformed. It doesn’t have any guardrails on it to keep the state in line. Everything is relevant, everything is admissible, and it creates big, messy trials.
When Young Thug made his guilty plea a month ago, his attorney, Brian Steel, said he felt like they were winning their case, but his client wanted to go home if he got the chance to do that. If you’re Steel, how do you feel seeing the remaining two defendants secure not-guilty verdicts?
I don’t think he’s surprised at all. I think even Young Thug thought he was probably going to be acquitted, but the prospect of spending months or years being woken up at 4 a.m., not having proper nutrition, not seeing your kids, not touching your wife, that’s fucking awful. Pleading guilty was the only way to end his punishment. How fucked up is that?
Do you think any of the defendants, including Thug, regret taking plea deals now?
I’m sure, but there’s no withdrawing the plea. It is what it is. Young Thug did have some moderately draconian probation conditions, but in a few years he might come back to terminate his probation, and I imagine the judge will grant that.
Do you expect this to change how Fulton County or Georgia approaches RICO cases in the future?
No. I think for them, the problems with this case were all the prosecutor’s office and nothing of the law. Maybe other prosecutors will pull back on these types of cases. The story I’ve heard from federal practitioners is that big federal RICO cases used to be common, and the Fed stopped doing them because it was a poor return on their investment. Maybe that’s the lesson prosecutors will take away.
There have been worries about what this case could mean for the prosecution of rap lyrics in the future. You’re saying this is not a viable model for cases, but do you think that there’s anything else to glean about the future of rap on trial here?
Well, there’s no First Amendment right not to have your statements used against you in court. So the problem isn’t with the rules of evidence for speech — it’s with laws that are so broad that anything you say becomes relevant at trial. Suddenly, you can bring in all kinds of stuff to try to paint the person as bad and hanging out with bad people. If you had a law like that in 1961, then Martin Luther King Jr. would’ve gotten more than criminal trespass for hanging out at a shop counter in Atlanta.
Do you think we might see people being more careful about admitting rap lyrics as evidence in the future, given some of the confusion in this case, or is that too hopeful?
The jurors were probably people who listened to some of this music. It probably helps a lot that this was a jury in Fulton County and not a jury in like, I don’t know, Cairo, Georgia. They could themselves think of the innocent explanations for these lyrics. It hurt the state’s credibility that they insisted on the worst possible version. That’s obviously silly.
Where do you see this case fitting in history, both in the state of Georgia and in Fulton County? How do you think we’re going to be thinking about this in ten years?
I think we’ll think of it as what the Trump trial would’ve been. People will have this retroactive history: Well, maybe if Trump had been tried in Georgia, it would’ve gone better. And I think this case shows that it would not. It would’ve been an incredibly unwieldy and lengthy trial if it was tried the way the YSL trial was, and they probably wouldn’t have gotten a conviction there either.
I think Fulton County, for a long time, has believed that because these cases induce pleas and are expensive to defend that it was all upside for them. Maybe the lesson of this case is there can be tremendous downsides once the public starts looking at what you’re doing.
This interview has been edited and condensed.
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