The federal trial of Hinds County District Attorney Jody Owens, former Mayor Chokwe Antar Lumumba, and former Councilman Aaron Banks begins July 13 in downtown Jackson. It will last about a month. By the time it ends, twelve jurors drawn from across the 18 counties of the U.S. District Court's Northern Division will have decided whether Jackson's top elected officials sold their offices for cash, plane rides, and a stay on a yacht. Here is how to follow it without a law degree.

The case began as an FBI sting. In 2023, undercover agents posing as private developers offered city officials money in exchange for help moving a convention center hotel project forward. The city had been trying to develop the empty lot across from the Jackson Convention Complex for two decades. The fake developers had everything the real ones never produced: a private jet, money to spend, and a willingness to fly local officials to Nashville and Fort Lauderdale. By the time the FBI was done, prosecutors had recordings of three city officials taking money or promising help. Two more, former Councilwoman Angelique Lee and Owens's cousin Sherik “Marve” Smith, pleaded guilty in 2024 and are expected to testify against the others.

The indictment is 17 counts spread unevenly across the three defendants. Owens carries 8. Lumumba carries 5. Banks carries 2. The lopsidedness reflects how the government sees their roles. Owens, prosecutors say, designed the scheme, recruited participants, and moved the money. Lumumba allegedly took $50,000 routed through campaign checks in exchange for moving a paperwork deadline. Banks allegedly took about $10,000, plus a protective detail and a job offer for his daughter, in exchange for promising to vote a certain way on a future council motion.

When prosecutors stand up to address the jury, expect them to lead with the most damning material first. They have hundreds of hours of recordings, including conversations about “cleaning” money and a reference to a “bag of information” on the city council. They have video of the trips. They have cash recovered during search warrants, including bills the FBI says were found inside a hollowed-out copy of the U.S. Constitution. The government will tell the jury this case is about three public officials who took private money to bend public process, and it will promise to prove every count beyond a reasonable doubt. Watch for the opening to lean heavily on Owens. The 8 counts against him include not only bribery and honest services wire fraud but also money laundering, a Travel Act count tied to the interstate trips, and a false statement count for allegedly lying to FBI agents.

The Owens defense, led by Washington attorney Warren Gary Kohlman, will tell the jury this is not a corruption case. It is an entrapment case. The FBI, the defense will argue, spent two years and more than a million dollars manufacturing a crime that would not have existed without their undercover agents. The hotel was never going to be built. The vote was never going to be held. The government created the temptation, lured Owens into it, and now wants twelve jurors drawn from central Mississippi to call the result a felony. Kohlman has argued before the U.S. Supreme Court and once defended a congressman caught in the FBI's original ABSCAM corruption sting in the 1980s. The legal playbook he used then is the same one he will use here.

The Lumumba defense, led by Gerald K. Evelyn, will tell the jury a different story. Lumumba does not deny that he made the phone call moving the deadline. He denies that doing so was a federal crime. Defense lawyers will lean on a 2016 U.S. Supreme Court decision called McDonnell, which overturned the bribery conviction of Virginia's then-governor. The Court ruled there that ordinary courtesies of political life, things like phone calls, meetings, and hosting an event, do not automatically become felonies just because money changed hands somewhere. Lumumba's lawyers will argue that nudging a paperwork deadline two weeks is exactly the kind of ministerial errand McDonnell says cannot anchor a bribery conviction. The city employee who carried out the change later said it raised no red flags. No developer was shut out. The judge has ruled the statute used here does not strictly require an “official act,” but he has left the hardest question, what exactly Lumumba had to agree to do, for the jury.

The Banks defense, led by E. Carlos Tanner III, will be the simplest of the three. Banks did not get on the private jet. He did not take the yacht trip. The two counts against him are the smallest charging package the government brought, just conspiracy and one count of federal program bribery. Tanner will tell the jury Banks was a small participant in someone else's scheme, and that the city never even held the vote he supposedly sold. The kind of paperwork the developers ended up submitting does not go before the council at all. No vote, the defense says, means no bribe. Just a promise about something that was never going to happen.

The government's witness list will be heavy with FBI personnel and the cooperators. Expect the undercover agents who played the developers to testify in detail about each trip, each conversation, and each handoff of money. Expect Angelique Lee and Marve Smith, the two who pleaded guilty, to walk the jury through the inside of the scheme. Expect forensic analysts to authenticate the recordings, the cash, and the financial records. The government recently filed a notice that it will introduce certain business records as “self-authenticating,” which means fewer custodian witnesses on the stand and more documents going up on the screen. Watch for that to speed things up.

The defense witness list is shorter and shakier. The Owens team had planned to call five experts: Burns, R. King, Sparks, C. King, and Webb. The government has moved to exclude all five for failure to comply with discovery rules, and Judge Jordan has not yet ruled. If the experts go, the heart of the Owens defense narrows considerably. Whether Owens himself takes the stand is the biggest unknown of the trial. So is Lumumba. Defendants in federal criminal cases are never required to testify, and there are obvious risks to doing so. The case may end up turning more on what the jury is told to think about the recordings than on any single witness.

Opening statements are not evidence. They are road maps. From the government, listen for which tape clips they preview to the jury. Those are the ones they intend to lead with. From Kohlman, listen for the word entrapment early and often. From Evelyn, listen for the word McDonnell and any framing of his client's phone call as routine. From Tanner, listen for an immediate effort to separate Banks from his co-defendants. All three defense attorneys asked the judge to try their clients separately. He refused. The three openings will be the first attempt at the same separation in front of the jury.

A trial of this scale rarely arrives at opening statements unchanged. A last-minute plea agreement remains legally possible up until trial begins, even though the formal plea deadline has passed. The judge can reject any deal the parties strike. Pretrial motions are still active. The recording designations and objections are due in less than two weeks, and the final pretrial conference is set for the morning of June 16, in the same courtroom where the trial will be held. Anything could move. The address and the date, finally, will not.

For Jackson, the trial is not just about three men. It is about whether a federal jury, drawn from across the 18 counties of the court's Northern Division, decides that the city's elected officials were running it for the highest bidder. The recordings will be played. The cash will be photographed. The cooperators will name names. Then twelve Mississippians will go behind a closed door and decide. The trial is scheduled to last about a month. The verdict, whenever it comes, will outlast the trial by years.