The judge overseeing the corruption trial of DeKalb County CEO Burrell Ellis said Monday the case was in its “home stretch,” with Ellis’ defense team preparing to tell their side of the story.
Prosecutors planned to rest their case Tuesday after more than two weeks of testimony from business owners, government employees and an informant who secretly recorded Ellis.
Ellis, the county’s twice-elected leader, is fighting charges that he intimidated companies into giving him campaign contributions, threatening to end their contracts with the county unless they made donations.
"I promise you we're making progress," Superior Court Judge Courtney Johnson told weary-eyed jurors at the end of Monday's proceedings. "We're in the home stretch."
In painstaking detail, prosecutors showed the jury how they believed Ellis mixed politics with county business.
They presented notebooks, found during police searches of Ellis’ home and office, that included handwritten notes showing whether county contractors had contributed to his 2012 re-election campaign.
With those notes projected on courtroom screens, prosecutors compared them with the names of contractors that had recently been awarded government jobs. In repeated examples, the names on the vendor lists matched the names Ellis wrote in the notebooks.
Ellis scribbled dollar amounts next to company names, representing how much he expected them to contribute. Next to the name of one company that resisted donating, National Property Institute, Ellis wrote “doesn’t return calls.”
Prosecutors also compared Ellis' notes to surreptitiously recorded conversations in which he said the county shouldn't be working with companies that didn't return his phone calls requesting campaign funds. To drive home their point, prosecutors re-played those recordings for jurors.
"I think really what should happen is we just dry them up," Ellis told the informant, DeKalb Purchasing Director Kelvin Walton, in reference to National Property Institute.
Ellis also said on the recordings he wouldn’t accept a contribution from National Property Institute, but investigator Clay Nix testified that Ellis later took a $2,500 donation from the company, and National Property Institute didn’t lose business from the county.
Ellis’ defense attorneys have argued that he didn’t punish companies for failing to donate, but he wouldn’t tolerate them not returning his phone calls.
One of the witnesses they plan to call Tuesday is U.S. Rep. Hank Johnson, a Democrat who represents DeKalb County. It’s not clear what Johnson would testify about, and he hasn’t been involved in the case so far. Prosecutors have said they will argue in court that Johnson’s testimony should be excluded.
After Ellis’ defense presents its case, a jury will decide whether to find him guilty on charges of bribery, extortion, theft and perjury. The most serious count, bribery, comes with a 20-year maximum sentence.
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