PHILADELPHIA — Jurors began their deliberations Wednesday in the federal bribery trial of Philadelphia City Councilman Kenyatta Johnson and his wife, Dawn Chavous, but broke for the day after roughly five hours of discussion without reaching a verdict.
U.S. District Judge Gerald A. McHugh handed the case to the panel of eight men and four women after spending the morning instructing them on the relevant law.
He sent them back for their first opportunity to discuss the case after more than three weeks of trial, urging them to treat each other with courtesy and not hesitate to allow their minds to be changed.
Now, the case, he told them, “is your providence and yours alone.”
The panel spent most of the afternoon cloistered, occasionally sending requests to the judge to see certain pieces of evidence including emails, invoices and other exhibits presented by both sides during the trial.
Johnson and Chavous passed the time milling around the courtroom in relative silence, pausing occasionally to chat with a sizable crowd of supporters who have shown up throughout the trial.
They avoided questions from reporters, as they have done throughout the proceedings, as they left the courthouse at the end of the day.
Johnson, a three-term Democrat whose district includes South and Southwest Philadelphia and part of Center City, has denied prosecutors’ allegations that he accepted $67,000 in bribes funneled to him by two executives at Universal Companies, an affordable housing nonprofit and charter school operator based in his district.
The government has alleged that the payoffs were disguised through what they have described as a sham consulting contract Chavous signed with the organization and that, in exchange, the council member twice used his elected position to help Universal with its troubled real estate holdings.
But Chavous and the couple’s two co-defendants — Universal’s former CEO Rahim Islam and ex-CFO Shahied Dawan — maintain that her work for the nonprofit was entirely legitimate and had nothing to do with anything her husband might have done on their behalf.
If convicted, Johnson, Chavous, Islam, and Dawan each face up to 20 years in prison on each count of honest services fraud they face.
Jurors will resume deliberations Thursday morning.
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