The finger pointing and personal battles between lawyers for suspended DeKalb County CEO Burrell Ellis and the prosecutors pursuing a public-corruption case against him continued in a brief hearing Friday.
Superior Court Judge Courtney Johnson did not rule on the handful of motions, including the question of whether both indictments against Ellis will move forward.
A grand jury first indicted Ellis in June on extortion and theft charges, accusing him of strong-arming county vendors to contribute to his re-election campaign and punishing those who refused.
In January, a second indictment clarified those charges and added three counts of perjury against Ellis, for a total of 14 counts he now faces.
Prosecutors want to pursue the second indictment without formally dismissing the first.
But that matter took up just a few minutes of debate, before Ellis’ lead attorney and the deputy chief assistant district attorney entered an increasingly heated exchange over a prosecution request that Johnson restrict what they can write in court motions filed in the case.
Prosecutor Lee Grant said Ellis’ lawyers should only argue the law in the filings and not be allowed to make “incredibly outrageous” accusations.
“They are asking to make this case a circus. Everyone knows they are trying to taint the jury pool,” Grant said. She called accusations that DA Robert James did not turn over all of the evidence in the case “specious, merit-less” allegations that led to James testifying for three hours in hearings late last month.
But Craig Gillen, Ellis’ lead defense attorney, argued that Ellis has a constitutional right to defend himself. By putting the DA and a former chief assistant prosecutor on the stand, Gillen said Ellis supported claims of a vendetta by James and raised questions about how the case against him came together.
“They don’t want to hear about the discrepancy between what the DA says and a former DA says,” Gillen said. “That’s painful for them. But bottom line is, they started this fight with their indictment of Mr. Ellis.”
At one point during Gillen’s arguments, Grant rose and objected so loudly that Gillen asked Johnson to “direct Ms. Grant to contain herself.”
John Petrey, a former DeKalb prosecutor who is a member of Ellis’ defense team, said the June indictment should either be dismissed outright or allowed to move forward so Ellis can challenge what he claims is a politically motivated case.
Grant said the case should be on the “dead docket” – keeping it alive while prosecutors pursue the second indictment.
Dismissing the first indictment could conceivably allow Ellis to be reinstated into the top job in DeKalb. Gov. Nathan Deal suspended him in July, a month after the indictment, and named Commissioner Lee May as interim CEO.
The situation has created upheaval in DeKalb that Johnson said she did not want repeated in her courtroom.
She had previously said she would prefer one of the cases against Ellis be dropped to keep that confusion at bay and repeated that preference Friday when interrupting the battling attorneys.
Rulings on that and other motions are not expected until sometime next week.
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