Putting 19 people on trial at the same time is a difficult assignment for any prosecutor - whether or not one of those defendants is a former president of the United States running to reclaim his old office.
The sprawling racketeering indictment returned this week by a grand jury in Atlanta presents a wide range of challenges. A big one is political: Finding jurors who don’t have unshakeable opinions about Donald Trump and others in his orbit.
Trump himself tried a similar tack in New York - to move to federal court a state case charging him with falsifying business records. That bid was denied. “Just because they have experience with it doesn’t mean that it’s easy,” said Robert James, a former district attorney in neighboring DeKalb County who’s now a defense attorney. “It’s going to be slow, it’s going to be methodical, laborious.”
In the indictment, Willis used Georgia’s Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act to weave a complex narrative that implicates multiple people accused of committing separate crimes in pursuit of a common goal. Some of the actions alleged are not necessarily crimes in themselves but are portrayed as helping to further an overall illegal scheme.
Some delays have been specific to that trial - transporting defendants housed in different jails to court each day, bringing contraband to court, the arrest of a defense attorney and a courtroom deputy. But jury selection, which began in January, is still going. That’s partially because the trial is expected to last six to nine months, meaning a lot of prospective jurors have legitimate excuses for saying no.
It’s easy for jurors to see defendants at a table as one group rather than as individuals, he said, so “the optics when you’re trying multiple defendants is that they’re all working together.”
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