Defense lawyers in the Young Thug racketeering conspiracy trial filed an emergency petition Thursday asking Georgia’s Supreme Court to step in and force Fulton County Chief Judge Ural Glanville to step down from the high-profile case now underway in Atlanta. Filed by lawyers representing Young Thug’s co-defendant and fellow rapper Yak Gotti , the 26-page petition claims Judge Glanville committed “judicial misconduct” and violated Yak Gotti’s constitutional right to a fair trial when he held a secret meeting with prosecutors and a key witness without alerting the defense. The witness, Kenneth Copeland, had been sworn in for live testimony in front of the jury on Friday, June 7, but was taken into custody and spent the weekend in jail when Judge Glanville found him in contempt for refusing to answer questions after signing an immunity deal.
The secret meeting on the morning of Monday, June 10, led into Copeland’s return to the witness stand. In their filing on Thursday, defense lawyers Douglas Weinstein, Jay Abt, and Katie Hingerty argue that “troubling facts” about the secret meeting “implicate” Judge Glanville in a joint effort to “coerce Copeland to testify.” They allege the judge and prosecutors engaged in an “effort to join forces” to get Copeland back on the witness stand under threat of returning to jail “indefinitely.
” “The only logical conclusion for the secret nature of the proceeding was to give Glanville in conjunction with the Stat.
