Biography
Luke Harper, age 27 of Lake Worth, Florida at the time of arrest, was one of 23 people arrested by Georgia State Patrol and the Atlanta Police Department during the March 5, 2023 raid on the Stop Cop City music festival in the South River (Weelaunee) Forest. He had posted Instagram video of himself at the action shortly before the arrests; that video was used by prosecutors to argue against bond. He was charged with domestic terrorism under Georgia's § 16-11-220 statute and was denied pretrial release at his preliminary hearing in May 2023, while a co-defendant who had not posted social media was granted a $25,000 bond on the same charges. He was held at the DeKalb County Jail through the summer of 2023. He was subsequently indicted in the August 2023 Stop Cop City RICO sweep along with 60 other defendants. The RICO case against him remains pending.
On January 18, 2023, during a multi-agency raid on the Stop Cop City forest encampment in the South River Forest near Atlanta, Georgia State Patrol officers shot and killed 26-year-old forest defender Manuel Esteban Paez Terán (Tortuguita). The killing — the first known police killing of an environmental activist on U.S. soil during a protest — accelerated and radicalized the multi-year movement against the construction of the Atlanta Public Safety Training Center, a 171-acre, $90+ million police and fire training facility in the South River Forest known to opponents as 'Cop City.'
Georgia and DeKalb County prosecutors responded with the most aggressive use of state-level domestic-terrorism and RICO statutes against a U.S. protest movement in modern history: 42 forest defenders were charged under Georgia's domestic-terrorism statute (originally enacted in 2017 in response to white-supremacist mass shootings) for activities ranging from camping in the forest to attending a March 2023 music festival a mile from the construction site. On August 29, 2023, an Atlanta grand jury returned a single 109-page RICO indictment against 61 of these defendants — the largest RICO indictment of a U.S. social movement in decades. Three Atlanta Solidarity Fund leaders were also indicted on 15 counts each of money laundering and charity fraud (charges later dropped in September 2024). The RICO case has remained largely stalled in pretrial proceedings; this database entry is for one of the small number of defendants who were denied bond or otherwise held in custody for meaningful periods before posting bail.
