1) Money: We have ~$1200 in WePay and $290 in cash. Juliana is trying to get the WePay money transfered to the credit union account. As always, it is taking longer than expected. We think we’re okay for immediate needs (namely the Feb 13/14 actions), but will need more in the future. Sara Amis is working with Art for the People to develop an overall approach to fundraising (note at AftP is a separate collective, but their goal is to routinely do fundraising for progressive groups, starting with Occupy). Sara is working with Occupy Athens to set up a joint fund raiser for the two OAs.

2) Discussion on what we support: We reviewed the proposal Juliana had previously made. Several friendly amendments were accepted, and we ended up with the following (we included comments/input from the online discussions)

The Occupy Atlanta (OA) Legal committee supports those who have been arrested due to Occupy Atlanta activities by providing jail support, facilitating communications, managing the legal fund (including bail money) and coordinating with volunteer lawyers. Because our resources (particularly bail funds and lawyers) are very limited, we are unable to guarantee full legal support to all events attended by, organized by, or publicized by OA participants.  It is not reasonable or possible for OA to provide legal support for any autonomous actions. Therefore we have adopted these guidelines to clearly state what type of support the OA Legal Committee is able to provide in different situations.

OA will provide support to the following situations in priority order:
1) First priority: Events/actions approved by the General Assembly for by an active  (as defined by the GA) Occupy Atlanta committee
a) For planned actions/events, the relevant committee must give Legal what they (the committee) consider to be the general bounds of the action in time, space and tactics. Legal will have to use some judgement, based on the information provided, to determine which arrests were related to participation in that action/event, but will err on the side of including, rather than excluding, arrests.
b) Legal needs to receive at least 48 hours notice before an action/event in order to identify lawyers to represent any arrests associated with the action/event. Please note that the lawyers are volunteers, therefore Legal can never guarantee that lawyers will be available, but will do as much as possible to identify lawyers for actions/events where Legal has received 48 hours notice.

2) Second priority: All other Occupy-related activities (broadly defined).
a) Occupy-related activities may include, but are not limited to, arrests due to to an OA activity not intended as an action (i.e. putting up/handing out flyers for Outreach), arrests that are potentially a result of targeting due to an participation in Occupy Atlanta (i.e. for jaywalking near the park), arrests related to an unplanned action, and arrests at national Occupy actions that have not been officially supported by OA.
b) For these situations, Legal will always support the arrestee by accepting phone calls from jail, communicating with their emergency contacts, and coordinating communications about the arrest with the rest of Occupy.
c) Legal will decide, using consensus, on a case-by-case basis whether to use legal funds or ask for attorney support for these arrests. If legal is unable to come to consensus, then legal will call an emergency GA to decide.Please note that it sometimes requires several hours, or a day for the Legal Committee to gather information about an arrest and reach consensus about how to classify it.  Legal’s unwillingness or inability to act immediately to bail someone out should not be perceived as an outright refusal to help.

There was consensus on this proposal. The committee members present in person felt that sufficient input had been received on this from other committee members (those not present), that they felt comfortable moving forward with consensus.

3) Fines: We agreed that Legal is unable to offer to pay for any fines that result from OA arrests. We don’t have sufficient funds to do so, but are happy to work with any separate fundraising activity that might be held.

4) We affirmed that we operate on 100% consensus with the legal committee.

5) Legal committee members: There was discussion about whether we needed clearer, or stricter, criteria for who is a legal committee member. One proposal was to require that a person attend two in-person meetings (not necessarily consecutively) before they can participate in consensus decision making. Some folks felt this was too restrictive, particularly for people who are active online, but unable to participate in person. Previously, we had decided that it was up to an individual to self-define as being part of Legal. Since we have not had any issues with this, we felt comfortable staying with that approach and not adopting any more formal criteria.

6) Shayna’s proposal that Legal need to know the location of an action/event 48 hours ahead of time in order to provide support: Shayna had sent this proposal out to the email list on Saturday. We decided to table the proposal to allow for further discussion online, since there are pros and cons to it that should be discussed.

7) Role of NLG Legal Observers: Juliana, speaking as an NLG person, stated that we should generally assume that LOs are not available. NLG-GA does not have sufficient LO infrastructure to provide an LO coordinator for most events. Juliana can’t do both OA legal/jail support and LO coordinate, and others are frequently not available. Given that, the best approach is to record/document the event (using whatever mechanisms we have available) and gather those records for legal at the end of the event. (Basically, LO in function, but not name.)

February 14 action at ATT

Notes from this part of the discussion are deleted from the minutes in order to maintain confidentiality about certain aspects of the action.