The diary of an environmental activist whom police shot and killed earlier this year is playing a crucial role in Georgia’s conspiracy case against 61 people tied to a police and fire department training center known as “Cop City”, offering an early window onto the state’s approach to the prosecution.

The Georgia deputy attorney general, John Fowler, has put forward a legal motion to enter the diary of Manuel Paez Terán, known as Tortuguita, as evidence in the Rico, or racketeering, case, sidestepping standard legal procedure while employing smear tactics and falsehoods, said observers of the case and based on the Guardian’s reporting.

“Tortuguita is dead – they’re not prosecuting Tortuguita,” said Dan Berger, a historian on social movements. “They’re trying to use the diary of somebody police killed to criminalize a whole movement. … The legal system obviously has no respect for privacy when the government seeks to criminalize thoughts and feelings. It’s very alarming.”

The state’s motion says the diary is needed to prove that dozens of defendants tied to opposition against the training center near Atlanta were involved in a criminal conspiracy in part because the document contains “to-do lists and notes from meetings” – suggesting evidence of criminal acts against Cop City. The case is the first time a racketeering law has been used against so many defendants in a political prosecution; these laws were developed to combat the mafia.

However, only about a dozen of the diary’s 150 or so pages were written while the activist was camped in protest against the training center at a public park near the project’s planned site, and none of those pages contains such material.

The one example of “lists and notes” the prosecution cites in its motion was written in another state – Florida – about a year before Paez Terán even knew about Cop City, according to a friend who was at the meeting cited and who wished to remain…