Young Thug’s attorney Brian Steel has won a ruling at the Georgia Supreme Court overturning a trial judge’s controversial decision to hold the lawyer in criminal contempt earlier this year amid the rapper’s ongoing Atlanta gang trial.
In a decision Tuesday, the state’s top court reversed Judge Ural Glanville’s June contempt ruling, in which he had sentenced Steel to 20 days in jail for refusing to reveal how he’d learned of a secret meeting between the judge and prosecutors – an incident that later saw Glanville removed from the case.
Given that Glanville’s presence at the secret meeting was directly involved in the dispute with Steel, the Supreme Court ruled that he should have recused himself and allowed another judge to decide the attorney’s fate.
“The exchange between Steel and Judge Glanville makes clear that Judge Glanville was involved in the controversy,” the high court wrote in its ruling. “For these reasons, a different judge should have presided over the contempt hearing, and the failure to do so requires reversal.”
Thug (Jeffery Williams) and dozens of others were indicted in May 2022 over allegations that his “YSL” was not really a record label called “Young Stoner Life” but rather a violent Atlanta gang called “Young Slime Life.” Citing Georgia’s Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations (RICO) law, prosecutors claim the group operated a criminal enterprise that committed murders, carjackings, armed robberies, drug dealing and other crimes over the course of a decade.
Months into the massive trial, Steel alerted Judge Glanville in early June that he had learned of a secret “ex parte” meeting that morning between the judge, prosecutors and a witness named Kenneth Copeland. Steel argued that such a meeting, without defense counsel present, had potentially involved coercion of a witness and was clear grounds for a mistrial.
Rather than address Steel’s complaints, Glanville instead repeatedly demanded that he divulge who had informed him about a private meeting in his chambers, suggesting the leak was illegal: “If you don’t tell me how you got this information, you and I are going to have problems.”
When Steel refused to comply, Glanville held him in contempt and sentenced him to 20 days to be served over ten consecutive weekends. After Steel filed an appeal, the Supreme Court put the sentence on pause until it was able issue its decision.
Glanville argued that the ex parte meeting had been entirely proper and repeatedly refused requests to step down from the case. But in July, after he referred the case to another judge, Judge Glanville was ordered to step aside over concerns about how the incident would impact the “public’s confidence in the judicial system.”
The bizarre episode, which resulted in weeks-long delay before Judge Paige Reese Whitaker took over, was slow-down in a massive trial that is already the longest in Georgia state history. It took an unprecedented 10-month process just to pick a jury, and the case has also been halted by the stabbing of another defendant and other unusual events.
While the slow-moving trial has dragged on, Thug has been sitting in jail for more than two years, repeatedly denied bond by both judges to handle the case over fears that he might intimidate witnesses. Prosecutors have only presented part of their vast list of potential witnesses, and the trial is expected to run well into 2025.
Last month, Whitaker appeared to reach her wits’ end with the prosecutors trying the case — complaining of “poor lawyering, “baffling” decisions and steps to repeatedly “hide the ball” amid a “haphazard” trial: “I don’t know if I can stress any more than I already have how much the state’s lawyers need to make an effort to be upfront and forthright in the trial of this case.”