After jail, house arrest and an ankle monitor, a reprieve for a ‘Cop City’ protester: ‘The process was the punishment’

On the phone from his Atlanta house last week, John “Jack” Mazurek said he felt “a few pounds lighter”.

It was no wonder. The 33-year-old Georgia carpenter was in a new reality, after resolving a three-year case involving attempts to charge him with felony arson for allegedly torching police motorcycles as part of a protest movement against a police training center known as Cop City.

The arson charge in Fulton county carried a sentence of up to 20 years. Superior court judge Emily Richardson agreed last week to having Mazurek take what’s known as an Alford plea to a reduced charge of criminal damage to property and a decade of probation.

When Mazurek was released from jail, authorities didn’t notify anyone at his house. It was 4am. “I took a bus and train home and remember walking into my neighborhood and crying, seeing the flowers and the bumblebees,” he said.

The case’s long unwinding follows several others connected to the movement against Cop City in recent months – including a judge’s dismissal, in September, of Rico, or racketeering, charges against 61 defendants. State attorney general Chris Carr has appealed.

The training center opened last spring on a 171-acre (70-hectare) footprint in a forest south-east of Atlanta despite protests that garnered international attention, especially after one protester was shot and killed by police. Opposition had come from a range of local and national organizations and was centered on concerns such as unchecked police militarization and clearing forests in an era of climate crisis. Atlanta police said the center was needed for “world-class” training.

Protests against it included the destruction of construction equipment and arson. It also included occupying a nearby forest, efforts to mount a referendum that gathered the signatures of more than 100,000 voters, historic levels of public participation in city council meetings, lawsuits and numerous protests.

Mazurek’s case started with the burning of several motorcycles, on 1 July 2023 at around 2am – the last day of a so-called “week of action” by protesters against Cop City. Seven months later, on 8 February 2024, local police and federal agents wearing balaclavas staged a Swat-style raid on Mazurek’s house. A national search for information followed, including 450 billboards in cities across the US and a $200,000 reward.

Mazurek spent two months locked up in local jails. During this period and since, he estimates receiving up to a thousand letters of support from across the US as well as Canada and Europe. These included letters “from friends I hadn’t seen in years, telling me how I had affected their lives”, Mazurek said. “It was like attending my own funeral.”

After being released from jail, a judge ordered Mazurek to be placed under 24-hour house arrest and to wear an ankle monitor. Police cars would pass by his house and those of his friends, honking horns or shining lights late at night.

Six months later, his attorney convinced the judge to loosen the house arrest restrictions, but he wore the ankle monitor another 12 months.,

After that restriction was removed, Mazurek had to download an app on his phone that would go off at all hours, requiring him to take a photo of himself. By this time, he and his partner had had a baby; the app’s alarm would stir them from sleep, bringing memories, he said, of being woken by officers breaking into his house with automatic weapons drawn, pointing a red beam at his face.

An unidentified, hidden camera was also placed on a utility pole outside Mazurek’s house. It was removed after the Guardian reported on it and fourth amendment concerns.

Despite all this, Fulton county prosecutor George Jenkins’s presentation of evidence against Mazurek in court last week was basically the same as two years ago. It centered on a soda bottle recovered at the scene and fashioned into an incendiary device that allegedly had what’s known as trace DNA from Mazurek.

But Mazurek’s attorney Lauren C Brown told the Guardian that a lab called Independent Forensics’ analysis of the evidence revealed there was genetic material from up to five more people on the bottle, none of whom were in the extensive database different agencies have built in five years of attempts to prosecute people connected to the movement against Cop City.

Additionally, Brown said, “with the amount of [Mazurek’s] DNA, you can’t determine if he even touched the bottle”.

The prosecutor also pointed to a journal with anti-government sentiments, a birthday card found in his house that included the words, “kill a cop” and the fact of Mazurek sending a text message about a music group playing during the week of action.

Toward the end of the hour-long hearing last week occasionally interrupted by his eight-month-old son’s gurgling, Mazurek and the prosecution agreed to the lesser charge as part of a non-cooperating plea. Judge Richardson said Mazurek must stay away from any “activities, movements, rallies or protests … outwardly expressing or proclaiming anti-government sentiment” – for the next decade.

Mazurek also agreed not to associate with “Defend the Atlanta Forest”, which the prosecutor called a group, but which was in reality a social media account used to broadcast messages about the movement, with no defined membership.

He noted the challenge in meeting both terms: “‘Anti-government’: who defines that?” he told the Guardian. “Is going to a punk rock show a violation?”

Will Potter, a journalist who has written about protest movements for decades, said such probation terms are common in politically motivated prosecutions. “It’s meant to further tighten the screws on both the defendant and the community – to isolate them and pull them out of legitimate, first amendment activity,” Potter said.

Mazurek noted that being locked up, the house arrest and the surveillance happened without him ever going to trial. “The process itself was meant to be the punishment,” he said. “They used the pretrial period as a sentence despite [me] not being convicted of anything.”

Mazurek wrote a statement about his experience of the last few years. “This case was never about bringing so-called justice to a perpetrator for an alleged crime. It was about instilling fear in a strong movement that shook this city to its core and exposed it’s [sic] dirtiest inner workings,” he said.

“Much of what the movement against Cop City assumed has already come to pass. Today, Minneapolis and other cities across the US act as training grounds for federal agents to practice unleashing terror on migrants, political opponents and random citizens alike. Cop City in Atlanta was only one stop on the incessant march to a cop nation.”