After protests of a police training center outside Atlanta turned deadly, prosecutors have decided to charge more than a dozen individuals with domestic terrorism charges. When police attempted to clear protestors from the center, gunfire erupted and one protestor was killed by police, and several opponents of the center were arrested. The decision to charge the protestors with domestic terrorism is based on a 2017 Georgia law that defines domestic terrorism as a an attempt to “intimidate the civil population or any of its political subdivisions” and change or coerce state policy or affect the conduct of government “by use of destructive devices, assassination, or kidnapping," among other things. Professor Patrick Keenan is quoted in the NBC News story about the charges, noting the decision to pursue domestic terrorism is fraught with political risk. "Domestic terrorism threats are coming from other places, and so to use this statute really publicly and prominently to try to squash this protest seems to me, kind of the politicized use of the law that a lot of people were worried about," he said.
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