Case Goes to Jury in Ex-Schools Chief's Retrial

The witness list was virtually unchanged. The judge and lawyers were the same. So, too, was much of the evidence, as former Prince George's County schools chief Andre J. Hornsby, whose last trial ended in a hung jury, was tried again on public corruption charges.

Yesterday, after a familiar round of closing arguments, the case was turned over to the participants whose presence set the current prosecution apart from the first one: the jurors.

In closing arguments at U.S. District Court in Greenbelt, the prosecution and the defense drew competing portraits of Hornsby, who resigned in 2005 and was indicted the following year. The government depicted Hornsby as a liar and a cheat, and the defense cast him as a hard-charging educator determined to do right by his students.

"Andre Hornsby was paid $250,000 a year by the people of Prince George's County, plus a car, plus a bonus," Assistant U.S. Attorney Stuart A. Berman said. "But that wasn't enough."

"He's aggressive," Hornsby's attorney, Robert C. Bonsib, told the jurors. "Maybe he ruffles feathers, but he ruffles them for the right reasons."

Hornsby, 54, is accused of taking kickbacks in exchange for steering school system contracts to his girlfriend and a longtime business associate. Jurors in his first trial deadlocked in November, and prosecutors brought the case a second time.

For the past four weeks, a familiar cast of witnesses -- notably, the FBI agent who videotaped Hornsby taking $1,000 off a motel room table and the ex-girlfriend who said she left $10,000 for Hornsby on their bed -- has passed through the fourth-floor courtroom of Judge Peter J. Messitte.

In 2003, Hornsby arrived in the county with a mandate to shake up the struggling system. Barely two years later, he quit amid questions about whether he had a financial interest in two contracts awarded by the school system.

One contract, for consulting on federal grant applications, went to a longtime business associate, Cynthia Joffrion, who cooperated with the FBI in a sting operation against Hornsby. With a hidden camera rolling inside a Bowie motel room, Hornsby pocketed $1,000 that prosecutors say was a down payment on a $145,000 kickback.

The other contract, for educational technology supplies, went to the company that employed Hornsby's live-in girlfriend, Sienna Owens. Although Owens was not the company's sales representative for Maryland, she negotiated key elements of the contract with Hornsby, she testified. When her cut of the commission came in, she split it with Hornsby, leaving $10,000 for him on the bed of their Mitchellville home, she said.

Hornsby faces 13 counts of wire fraud and five counts of mail fraud, stemming from his alleged use of phone, e-mail and postal communications to carry out fraud and deprive the public of "honest services." He is also charged with two counts of attempted evidence tampering, one count of attempted witness tampering and one count of obstruction of justice, stemming from his alleged efforts to destroy e-mails and other electronic records and to influence the testimony of Joffrion and Owens.

In his closing argument, Berman said that innocent people don't do what Hornsby did. "The defendant acted guilty because he was guilty," Berman said. "You can infer criminal intent from the guilty things he did."