PHILADELPHIA — The federal bribery trial of Philadelphia City Council member Kenyatta Johnson ended in a mistrial Tuesday, offering an ambiguous conclusion that left prosecutors vowing to retry the case and did little to clarify his future in elected office.
After four days and roughly 25 hours of deliberations, jurors told U.S. District Judge Gerald A. McHugh, they were hopelessly deadlocked on each of the two counts of honest services fraud the council member; his wife, Dawn Chavous; and their two co-defendants faced.
“Individuals from both sides do not believe any additional evidence will change their mind,” the jurors said in a note — their third in as many days indicating they had reached an impasse.
McHugh privately interviewed the jury foreperson in his chambers and then called the others back into the courtroom to announce he would be dismissing them from further service.
“You have failed to reach a verdict, but you have not failed,” he told them. “You came together as a jury. You did what we asked you to do. ... The inability to reach a verdict is a part of the American system.”
That inconclusive send-off capped a five-week trial that had threatened to make Johnson, a three-term Democrat from Point Breeze, the second member of the Philadelphia City Council to lose his seat after a corruption conviction in less than a year. It also delivered a setback to a U.S. attorney’s office with a recent record of big swings and victories in bribery cases against the likes of labor leader John J. Dougherty, City Council member Bobby Henon, District Attorney Seth Williams and U.S. Rep. Chaka Fattah.
Johnson and his wife — their faces behind masks — showed little reaction as the judge announced his decision. As jurors filed out and court adjourned, the couple paused for smiles and hugs with friends and family gathered in the gallery.
“Oh man, oh man, oh man,” Johnson muttered to himself with an overwhelmed and exhausted expression on his face.
He emerged from the courthouse moments later hand-in-hand with his wife and offered his first public statement since the trial began to an awaiting crush of TV news cameras.
“I want to thank all my family, friends and supporters for praying for us — showing us support — during this very stressful time,” he said.
His lawyer, Patrick Egan, said they hoped Tuesday’s outcome could persuade prosecutors to drop their case.
“The issue ... was that there was no evidence,” he said. “Fortunately, some of the jurors obviously saw it that way as well. And we believe that that won’t change because there is no evidence because my client did nothing wrong.”
But neither Johnson, 48, nor his wife, 42, is in the clear just yet.
Within an hour of the judge’s decision, a spokesperson for the U.S. attorney’s office said the office was committed to retrying them and their co-defendants — Rahim Islam and Shahied Dawan, two nonprofit executives accused of providing the couple with $67,000 in payoffs in exchange for political favors — with a new jury at a later date.
It was not immediately clear what issue left the first panel mired in deadlock or how the deliberations split. The eight men and four women all declined to comment as they left the courthouse Tuesday afternoon.
“Absolutely not,” one woman said as she hurried to the elevators and quickly left the building. Meanwhile, a group of four lingered in the lobby for several minutes, quietly remaining behind to continue hashing over the case among themselves.
The jury’s uncertainty contrasted with the confidence projected by both sides throughout the trial — one in which the government had painted Johnson and Chavous as a “South Philly power couple” living beyond their means and lining their pockets with bribes, and in which the defense vowed it would prove every word of that description was false.
Unlike the trial of Johnson’s former City Council colleague Henon — who was convicted of bribery charges last year in a corruption case involving labor leader Dougherty that was rife with wiretapped recordings — Johnson’s trial featured little direct evidence to support the bribery charges.
Instead, prosecutors presented a largely circumstantial case based on bank records, emails, and invoices that they said prove that Johnson had twice used his position to financially benefit Universal Companies — an affordable housing nonprofit and charter school operator in his district — in exchange for a steady stream of bribes.
Those payoffs, prosecutors said, were disguised in the form of a $67,000 consulting contract Islam signed with Chavous, a noted charter school advocate, former chief of staff to state Sen. Anthony Hardy Williams, and a politically connected consultant.
The case’s lead investigator, FBI Special Agent Richard Haag, estimated that Chavous had done less than 40 hours of work for the money Universal paid her between 2013 and 2014 and described her workload as next-to-nonexistent.
Universal’s continued payments to Chavous and the timing of Universal’s requests of Johnson — first for help in 2014 with a zoning bill to advance its planned redevelopment of the Royal Theater on South Street, then to protect a parcel of land it owned at 13th and Bainbridge Streets from city seizure — left little doubt that bribery had occurred, Assistant U.S. Attorney Mark Dubnoff said during closing arguments.
“It’s the same way you know it’s raining,” he said. “When someone comes inside with a raincoat and umbrella and they’re both dripping wet.”
But the defense balked not only at Haag’s dismissal of Chavous’ work for Universal but also at what the lawyers described as the presumptuousness of prosecutors’ efforts to assign their own value to her work.
Several Universal employees testified that despite the government’s characterizations, Chavous had been an asset to the nonprofit’s charter school operations, helping to fund-raise, introducing executives to her network of wealthy education philanthropists, and setting up tours and meetings to raise awareness about its schools.
“This case is not about whether two prosecutors and Agent Haag think this woman’s work has value,” her attorney, Barry Gross, said in his closing speech to the jury.
Speaking Tuesday, he added: “Mr. Johnson and Ms. Chavous have gone through a lot in six years. You can imagine the pressure this has been on them and their family, and they hope this is the end of it.”
But it remained unclear how long their reprieve would last.
As of late Tuesday, McHugh had not set a date for a retrial for Johnson and Chavous or said when Islam and Dawan would face trial on additional charges that they also bribed a school district official in Milwaukee and embezzled more than $500,000 from Universal over a period of years.
For now though, Johnson said, as he and Chavous pushed through the crowd of reporters outside the courthouse to an awaiting car, he is ready to get back to work.
“I’ll continue fighting on behalf of the residents that I represent in the Second Councilmanic District,” he said.
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(Inquirer staff writers Max Marin and Ximena Conde contributed to this article.)
