ATLANTA – The Supreme Georgia Court on Tuesday morning refused to re -examine the decision of the lower court disqualifying the District of the County of Fulton, Fani Willis, of the pursuit of the 2020 elections of President Donald Trump and eight of his co -accused.
“The Supreme Court today rejected the request for Certiorari,” wrote the court.
Three judges – Ellington, McMillian and Colvin – dissident from the decision. Chief judge Peterson and Justice Land did not participate in the decision.
The decision means that the decision of the lower court of appeal in December 2024 disqualifying Willis of the case remains in place, ending his role in the case.
This decision to appeal canceled a decision by Fulton’s county judge, Scott McAfee, who would have enabled him to continue the case if the special prosecutor Nathan Wade had resigned, which he did.
The revelation of the beginning of 2024 of a romantic relationship between Da Willis and Wade, which she had hired for the case, has derailed the procedures against President Trump and the other remaining accused.
The Georgia Court of Appeal judged that McAfee judge had “committed” his order to resolve the question of whether the relationship had created a conflict of interest in the case.
“The appeal designed by the Court of First Instance to prevent an appearance in the process of irregularity did nothing to face the appearance of irregularity which existed at times when Da Willis exercised its broad preliminary discretionary power on which to continue and that the accusations to carry,” said the ordinance of the Court of Appeal. “Although we recognize that an appearance of irregularity is generally not enough to support disqualification, this is the rare case in which disqualification is compulsory, and no other remedy will be enough to restore public confidence in the integrity of these procedures.”
Willis had argued that it was a “completely new application of disqualification standards”.
“No Georgia court has ever disqualified a district prosecutor for the simple appearance of irregularity without the existence of a real conflict of interest,” said Willis in a previous deposit. “And no Georgia court has ever reversed the order of a court of first instance refusing to disqualify a prosecutor based solely on an appearance of irregularity.”
Judge Pinson wrote in a competitive opinion with the majority of the majority of not hearing the appeal which: “If this question – if the conduct of the creation of an appearance of irregularity alone is a provision of disqualification of a prosecutor – is presented by future cases, we may well need to take it back in one of them. that The question perhaps worthy of certificate is not presented by This Case, at least not as it appears before this court. “”
Following the decision of the Supreme Court of the State to leave the decision to appeal, the defendant’s lawyer Michael Roman, Ashleigh Merchant, shared this declaration with the 11alive political team.
“This case has always been exceptional in the way it was managed, which is why it demanded such an extraordinary remedy,” she said. “The gaps in judgment and inability to accept the responsibility of these shortcomings have infected this case since its creation. We hope that this will ultimately make this chapter.”
Steve Sadow, president of President Trump, also weighed on Tuesday morning.
“This appropriate decision should put an end to unjustified political persecution, the persecution of the law of the president,” he said.
Not all judges agree with the majority of the majority of not hearing the appeal. In a dissident opinion, the McMillian judge wrote that “the legal question necessarily presented here – if a lawyer can be disqualified according to the appearance of imprecision alone – affects each active lawyer in the state of Georgia”.
She argued that the court should have heard the appeal in order to resolve the decisions of the lower courts “in conflict” with each other. The Ellington and Colvin judges joined this dissent but could not persuade the majority of judges from their point of view.
Judge Pinson, condemned to the majority, explained that Willis’s decision not to ban McAfee’s decision consisted in “taking as undisputed given the conclusion by the court of first instance of a significant appearance of approval and that a few Type of disqualification appeal was necessary to resolve the damage caused by the conduct of prosecutors. “”
Thus, the only question for the Supreme Court of the State would be whether the Court of Appeal was wrong to determine that McAfee “committed” with his “one of you must go” (as Pinson invented it) for the appearance of the impact. The Supreme State Court concluded that there was no reason to review this narrower question.
“In short, rather than deciding on any broader question on the question of whether an appearance of irregularity can serve as an independent reason for the disqualification of prosecutors, the decision of the Court of Appeal seems to have resolved a close and specific dispute in the case concerning the choice of disqualification by the court of first instance,” wrote Pinson. “If it is the best reading of the decision of the Court of Appeal – and I think it is – this decision does not raise a question of gravity which justifies our additional examination.
“The question of whether a court of first instance abused its discretion in the choice of a particular recourse in disqualification in the specific and unusual circumstances of this case is not a question of the law of Georgia, likely to occur in future cases.”
The Georgia Court of Appeal did not however throw the whole case, because the defense lawyers for President Trump and his co-accused had asked.
But by confirming the decision of the Court of Appeal disqualifying Willis and his office, the future of the pursuit of electoral engineers is endangered. The former county of Dekalb, Da Robert James, told 11alive last December that the case would be transferred to the jurisdiction of the Council of Prosecutors of Georgia.
It would be up to this third -party organization to award a new prosecutor to take over the case – which would have autonomy to examine the entire case.
“There is no prosecutor’s office in the state of Georgia which will obtain a case of this magnitude, of this import, and not to say” listen, we must demolish it in the studs and look at everything and take a determination of what we should go and what we should not go “,” said James.
