The Atlanta Solidarity Fund had been functioning as a movement bail fund for nearly fifteen years before Georgia Attorney General Chris Carr indicted its three named organizers in May 2023 on money-laundering and charity-fraud counts arising from how they accounted for the money they used to bail out Stop Cop City defendants. Through all of 2024 the three remained under indictment, on bond, and fighting the case.
What the fund did
The Atlanta Solidarity Fund, organized as a project of the Network for Strong Communities, provided bail and legal-support funds for arrested protesters in Atlanta — anti-police-violence demonstrators, environmental defenders, racial-justice organizers, and beginning in 2021–2023 a large cohort of Stop Cop City forest defenders. Bail funds are a long-standing U.S. social-movement infrastructure dating to the National Bail Out collective and earlier; they exist because the U.S. cash-bail system makes pretrial freedom a function of wealth.
The prosecution
In May 2023 the Georgia State Patrol arrested Kautz, Maclean, and Patterson at their shared home in Atlanta on charges of money laundering and charity fraud — the state\'s theory being that reimbursing forest-defender expenses (camping supplies, food, gas) constituted laundering "racketeering proceeds" and that listing those reimbursements in the fund\'s accounting amounted to charity fraud. Bail was set at $15,000 each. They were among the first defendants in U.S. history to be criminally charged for the act of organizing bail support.
The three were later added as defendants in the September 2023 RICO indictment that swept up 61 Stop Cop City organizers. Their cases have proceeded on parallel tracks — the separate Atlanta Solidarity Fund charging and the broader RICO inclusion — both pressed by Carr\'s office and both increasingly understood by national civil-liberties observers as a test prosecution.
What civil-society organizations did in 2024
The case attracted broad opposition across civil society in 2024. The Movement for Black Lives, the National Lawyers Guild, the ACLU, the Center for Constitutional Rights, the Bail Project, the Community Justice Exchange, and dozens of regional bail funds signed letters condemning the prosecution. Forty-two civil-rights organizations filed an open letter to Attorney General Merrick Garland in 2024 asking the federal government to publicly disavow the state\'s theory. The Inter-American Commission on Human Rights opened a formal monitoring file. The U.N. Special Rapporteur on Human Rights Defenders raised concerns.
None of it has caused the state of Georgia to drop the charges.
Why this case matters beyond Atlanta
If the state of Georgia can hold bail-fund organizers criminally liable for the act of bailing out protesters, the legal theory will travel. Every state has post-Ferguson bail funds. Every protest movement of the next decade will face the same calculation: whether to organize bail support knowing that doing so could itself become a charging instrument. The Atlanta Solidarity Fund prosecution is being watched, accordingly, by every U.S. movement-defense organization at the level of an existential test case.
As of end-of-2024 the case remains unresolved. The defendants continue to operate the fund. NPPC tracks the case and publishes updates as the matter moves through pretrial.
