ATLANTA — Advocacy groups including teacher representatives and the Georgia NAACP are calling on a Fulton County judge to bring an end to the long-running Atlanta Public Schools cheating case.
They are making their call ahead of a hearing Thursday before Judge Jerry Baxter, in which a lawyer for the last six remaining defendants in the case will seek to withdraw from the case on his belief it's a conflict of interest to represent all six.
The case originates with the charges that educators had changed student answers on state standardized tests in 2009. In 2013, 35 educators were indicted and 23 eventually confessed. Another 12 went to trial a year later and 11 were ultimately convicted.
The case, in aggregate, is now considered the longest criminal trial in Georgia's history. The six still in question are pursuing appeals of their convictions.
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Citing the precedent of Judge Baxter last year granting a principal convicted in the case, Dana Evans, community service instead of prison time, advocates are now calling for Baxter to effectively wind down the cases of the six remaining defendants.
"It is as evident to us today as it was almost exactly a year ago, when the last hearing around this case was set to take place - as it was nearly 10 years ago when the first indictments of Georgia public school educators began - the APS cheating scandal must come to an end," said Sarah Abdelaziz of the Abolitionist Teaching Network during a conference call with reporters on Wednesday.
Abdelaziz said it's the belief of the advocacy groups that "not a single child in the public school system of Atlanta or Georgia has benefited from these legal actions."
Investigators for the state across the years implicated a total of 178 APS educators in the years-long scandal.
“Kids with low grades in class all of a sudden had exceptional scores for CRCT. Some couldn’t even read or do basic math,” ex-Fulton County DA Paul Howard told 11Alive in 2019.
Nonetheless, Gerald Griggs, the Georgia NAACP president and former counsel for some of the defendants, said Wednesday the prosecutorial effort never did anything for the students themselves.
"Eight months of witnesses, hundreds and hundreds of documents, thousands of court hours - where no child was remediated - was a waste of time," he said. "And so to still, almost 10 years later, be still talking about and litigating this issue, it's time for us to close the chapter on this ugly part of Atlanta's history."
Griggs specifically made a plea to Judge Baxter to dismiss the remaining six cases.
The public defender for the six remaining defendants, Stephen Scarborough, previously tried to withdraw and was denied a motion by Judge Baxter to do so in 2019. The last active prosecutor originally on the case, Linda Dunikoski, left the Fulton DA's Office that same year.
He argued that defending the six clients together was hindering him from providing the best defense possible to each of them individually.
"My loyalty to each of my six clients requires me to omit issues I would otherwise raise, or at least to argue those issues less robustly than I otherwise would - still at my ethical peril- as compared to the way I would argue an individual client’s appeal were I free to advocate for a lone defendant," Scarborough argued in his motion.
The arrangement, he argued then, constituted a conflict of interest inconsistent with Sixth Amendment protections.
Abdelaziz said Wednesday "no educator should go to prison over a test" and "no lawyer should be forced into a conflict of interest to represent them."
"We're tired, and the people of Atlanta and Georgia are tired," she said. "Judge Jerry Baxter has the power to draw this to a close, and we implore you please use that power."