Trump, 18 others charged under Georgia’s RICO Act. Here’s what that means

globalnews.ca:

The latest indictment against Donald Trump accuses the former U.S. president and 18 other defendants of allegedly participating in a criminal conspiracy to overturn the 2020 election results in Georgia — and it uses a law typically levied against organized crime networks.Georgia’s Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act, otherwise known as the RICO Act, is modeled after a similar but narrower federal law that was introduced to combat the mafia in the 1970s.Many other states quickly introduced their own, broader RICO laws that can be used to prosecute any kind of criminal enterprise in which alleged participants commit crimes in furtherance of a larger scheme.“RICO laws punish more severely the participation in a criminal enterprise to commit a series of crimes, recognizing the greater harms posed by a group of people acting with the purpose of committing multiple crimes,” Mary Fan, a law professor at the University of Washington, explained in an email.Within the RICO charge applied to all 19 defendants, the other felony counts — 40 in all — are portrayed as further criminal acts in service to the overall conspiracy.