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.