The racketeering trial of former DeKalb County school Superintendent Crawford Lewis and two others has been pushed back to October, almost three and a half years after they were first charged.
And now the prosecution is expected to bring a second “superseding” indictment — one that revises and updates the revised indictment returned in May 2012, defense attorneys said Friday.
Lewis, his former chief operating officer, Pat Reid, and her former husband, Tony Pope, are charged with violating the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organization Act, theft by a government employee, bribery and falsifying a public document. The first indictment returned in 2010 also included Reid’s secretary, but Cointa Moody was dropped as a defendant when the first revised indictment was returned in 2012. Moody died in January.
Defense attorneys said they were only told the indictment from 2012 would be streamlined. District Attorney Robert James declined to comment after a hearing on the case Friday afternoon.
“My life has been in limbo for three years and my family and I are ready to get this resolved,” Lewis said Friday.
Lewis’ trial had been scheduled to start Monday before being pushed back to Oct. 15.
All three have pleaded not guilty and they will be tried together.
Prosecutors say Reid steered multimillion-dollar school construction projects to her then-husband’s architecture firm and select vendors, and Lewis signed off on all those contracts.
The issue before DeKalb County Superior Court Judge Cynthia Becker at Friday’s hearing concerned the destruction of notes taken by the lead investigator. Clay Nix of the District Attorney’s Office has testified that he destroyed the handwritten notes from interviews with dozens of witness after making “bullet points” of what he thought was pertinent to the case.
One of Lewis’ attorneys, Bernard Taylor, said there were questions about details Nix included in affidavits for search warrants that were not in the records prosecutors turned over to the defense team. Lewis’ lawyers want to know the date those notes were destroyed because they are concerned it was after defense lawyers requested them.
Assistant District Attorney Christopher Timmons said the notes would not be allowed as evidence, but defense attorneys could question Nix about them. “There is nothing shady about the fact that his notes were destroyed,” Timmons said.
The defense asked for a court order to allow a forensic examination of the investigator’s computer to see when he wrote the bullet points. That would give them an idea of when the handwritten notes were destroyed. The judge said she would rule soon on the motion.
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