Seven months after jurors reported to the Fulton County Courthouse for the Atlanta Public Schools cheating trial, almost six months after they heard from the first witness, defense attorneys and prosecutors are scheduled to make their final arguments in a racketeering case that was years in the making.
The jurors will decide, was it racketeering or one of the lesser felonies? Or was it no crime at all?
Closing arguments begin today and are expected to stretch over over three days.
Prosecutors and defense attorneys estimate they will take 17 hours to sum up what 160 witnesses said and the thousands of pages of evidence discussed.
For six years, the cheating scandal has hovered over the school district and the state, tarnishing Atlanta’s image and influencing a nationwide conversation about schools’ reliance on test scores. Teachers lost jobs because of it, and while many think the school system has succeeded in moving ahead, some parents doubt that the harm to their children will ever really be remedied.
A verdict will answer the question: Were 12 former teachers and school administrators part of a criminal conspiracy to cheat on the 2009 Criterion-Referenced Competency Test? They could go to prison for as long as 20 years if the jury says they were.
“They (attorneys) will have to reel in six months of evidence and remind them (jurors) of things from week two, week three, week four” of the trial, said defense attorney Ken Hodges, who was Dougherty County’s district attorney for 12 years.
Suspicions of cheating were first raised by The Atlanta Journal-Constitution because of unlikely improvements in scores on the 2009 CRCT. The federal government’s mandate of ever-improving scores and then-Superintendent Beverly Hall’s demand for even better results were at the core of the alleged conspiracy.
Proving a conspiracy isn’t easy: Prosecutors have to show there were at least two crimes — in this case those could be false swearing or writing or theft by taking — for a common goal. Defendants don’t necessarily have to know each other to be convicted in the same conspiracy.
“RICO (the racketeering law) is complex. it takes a while to break it down,” said J. Tom Morgan, a former DeKalb County district attorney who was on Hall’s defense team. Jurors “understand when you’ve got murder, prostitution and gambling. How do you apply it to a cheating case? When you look at why RICO is even here, it’s because the Mafia and organized crime had so many tentacles going in every direction.”
Every day since Aug. 11, the 12 defendants and their lawyers have sat in one of the six rows set aside for the defense in the Fulton County Courthouse. Yet the alleged conspiracy kingpin, Hall, was never present. Because she had breast cancer and was too sick to sit in court day after day, the judge decided she could be tried separately if she recovered. Hall died March 2, less than a week after testimony ended.
It seemed at times that Hall was being tried in absentia. Prosecutors have said she was the instigator and was the reason the conspiracy continued.
Most of the jurors, six men and six women, have kept notes. And they will have all the evidence in the room with them when they start deliberating.
So how much do closing arguments matter?
“After jury selection, closing arguments are the most important part of a trial,” said Clayton County District Attorney Tracy Graham Lawson. “You put things in perspective and explain how the law, as the judge will give them, applies to the facts.”
In longer trials, closing arguments are even more important, said Gwinnett County District Attorney Danny Porter, who is chairman of the Prosecuting Attorneys’ Council of Georgia.
“The lawyers’ ability to clarify the issues and point out the most important facts is going to be a big deal.”
But some studies have indicated jurors make up their minds as early as opening statements.
“Whatever that verdict is, they have it in their minds before closing arguments, and closing argument doesn’t change it,” Morgan said. “The reality is that the jurors have made up their minds even though they have been told not to.
“It’s going to be tough on the defense attorneys to make their arguments unique to their clients so jurors can remember when they are deliberating,” said Morgan, a veteran of conspiracy trials both as a prosecutor and as a defense attorney.
The lists of charges against each defendant differ. Many were charged with submitting false records, and all of them were accused of conspiracy under Georgia’s Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act.
The trial began and ended with teenagers testifying about damage they suffered because their CRCT scores suggested they had better grasps of reading, math and language arts than they actually did. They missed out on critical remedial instruction because of their falsely high scores, which prevented them from qualifying for tutoring or remedial services. Teachers and administrators erased wrong answers or guided them during the tests, according to testimony.
Students and parents put human faces on the alleged cheating conspiracy. Some of the 21 educators and administrators who pleaded guilty in the case testified about threats and pressure to cheat and an overall vindictive atmosphere inside Atlanta’s elementary schools.
Witnesses called by defense attorneys described the accused as innovative educators who would never cheat while those making allegations against them were characterized as liars trying to settle long-held grudges or save their own skins.
And jurors also had to sit through hours of mind-numbing testimony about statistics and policies.
“Each sided should know the jury is fatigued, weary and ready to be done and they don’t want to hear hours and hours and hours more in argument,” Hodges, the former Dougherty County district attorney, said. “They should not beat a dead horse. Either side.”
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