Voters in the Brunswick Judicial Circuit will select a district attorney on May 21, a choice mired with questions of ethics and integrity unlike other DA races.
In a historic vote four years ago, residents of the circuit — which include Glynn, Camden, Wayne, Appling and Jeff Davis counties — rebuked the former incumbent DA Jackie Johnson largely due to accusations of how she handled the investigation into jogger Ahmaud Arbery’s death. Participation in the election jumped from around 60,000 votes in 2016 to around 87,000 in 2020, when voters picked an Independent DA candidate, Keith Higgins, instead of a Republican one for the first time in more than two decades.
Higgins is now running for his second term, this time as a Republican. His election message is that he has successfully threaded the needle of restoring public confidence in the DA’s office — diminished by the prior administration’s actions — while also keeping the community safe as a conservative-minded DA.
Higgins’ primary challenger is a 47-year prosecutor and veteran of the DA’s office, John B. Johnson (unrelated to the former DA). John B. Johnson’s contention is that he helped build the office to what it is today and that Higgins is not trying nearly as many cases as he should. While leaning on his experience as to why voters should trust him, Johnson has had to address accusations of prosecutorial misconduct that he has accrued over the years.
There are no qualified Democratic candidates for DA, so the race will essentially be decided in the May 21 primary. Whoever wins will be on the general ballot in November unopposed. Both men sat down with The Current to discuss their candidacies.
Differing answers to credibility issue
Questions of integrity, fairness and community safety are suffused with the vote for Higgins or Johnson.
Higgins said he has worked hard to shed the image of a DA’s office that is unaccountable and untrusted.
“Public confidence has increased in the district attorney’s office since I was elected,” Higgins said, “I think that’s been primarily due to how we are conducting ourselves and each individual case that we have.”
The need to increase public confidence stems from the agency’s troubled history. Former DA Jackie Johnson was indicted in 2021 on charges she stepped in on the behalf of her former employee, Greg McMichael, as he was being investigated in the killing of Ahmaud Arbery. Those charges are still pending.
To John B. Johnson, there was no credibility problem stemming from the DA’s office after Arbery. In fact, he believes his former boss was railroaded by a case that received local, national and international scrutiny.
“I know for a fact that Jackie Johnson did what she was required, both ethically and legally, to do,” he said, “Which was (to) recuse the office.” He admits that he has not seen any of the evidence — no members of the public have as the case continues to age.
“What people don’t understand is we don’t have the power to order somebody arrested,” John B. Johnson said of the pressure to arrest the McMichaels after Arbery’s death. However, the indictment against Johnson accuses her of personally intervening to protect the McMichaels.
He said the killing was a tragedy for the Arbery family and for Brunswick.
“But Jackie did what she’s supposed to do,” he continued, “No good deed goes unpunished.”
Prosecutorial misconduct accusations
Even before the Arbery case, the office Jackie Johnson ran for a decade — after she was appointed by the governor to the post in 2010 — was marred by accusations of favoritism or not playing by the rules.
In 2011, shortly after taking office, Jackie Johnson was criticized for her handling of the grand jury investigation into the shooting of Caroline Small by former Glynn County Police Officer Cory Sasser. Years later, Jackie Johnson presided over the controversial investigation into Glynn County’s former police chief, John Powell, whose charges were invalidated by the state Supreme court last month. Even though Jackie Johnson led the charge to investigate the officers overseeing drug unit misconduct, cases her office identified as tainted by those officers were never reviewed, The Current revealed in a recent investigation.
Throughout this tumult, former DA Jackie Johnson’s second in command was John B. Johnson. He oversaw the office in Brunswick and was “considered a trial lawyer for murders and death penalty,” he said.
Raised in Statesboro and steeped in the Baptist Church, John B. Johnson was slated to become a preacher before joining the Air Force. He went on to law school instead and was hired to prosecute cases in Wayne County. John B. Johnson ran for Brunswick Judicial Circuit DA in 1996 as a Democrat but lost to Stephen Kelley. He stuck with the office. By 2020, John B. Johnson had worked for three different Brunswick Judicial Circuit DAs.
John B. Johnson’s said things have changed since he was in charge. He said that law enforcement has problems with Higgins dismissing too many cases for lack of evidence. He attributed that the lack of evidence as actually a “lack of working with law enforcement and a lack of experience.”
Should he be elected, John B. Johnson said he wants to strengthen ties with police, putting a prosecutor in each county in the judicial circuit to allow law enforcement to ask questions and not to dismiss cases that can be tried.
The current DA’s office already has prosecutors in every county they oversee that police can go to, according to Higgins.
Higgins also stated his office has a “99% conviction rate and convicted 3,500 criminals” in the last three years. He said integrity underlies everything his prosecutors do, even when it doesn’t help them — a jab at John B. Johnson’s checkered history as a prosecutor.
In several cases that John B. Johnson worked on or was the lead prosecutor, defendants, lawyers and judges have complained he cheated to win in trials, according to news reports and court documents.
An Atlanta Journal Constitution investigation in 2020 highlighted how John B. Johnson withheld favorable evidence to the lawyers of the people he was prosecuting.
The report found that John B. Johnson and/or the team he was leading committed misconduct by not communicating key evidence they had that could have helped the case of the defendant. These pieces of evidence included a star witness’ payment by prosecutors, a jailhouse snitch’s history of testifying for the state or witness statements that pointed to another suspect.
John B. Johnson declined to comment to the AJC at the time but denied all wrongdoing when speaking with The Current last month. He claimed the AJC had an agenda and was out to get him. John B. Johnson also said that any evidence revealed that could have changed cases was simply Monday-morning quarterbacking.
“All that I can do as a prosecutor is use the law that we have at the time, the procedures that we have at the time, and go do the best that I can within that,” he said. “That’s been done in every case. People can complain, whatever they want to.” John B. Johnson said these few cases don’t diminish a career of prosecuting 400+ cases.
In his interview with The Current, John B. Johnson voiced a judicial philosophy that could have been what animated his actions all those years ago.
“It is wrong to put an innocent person in prison. That’s absolutely wrong,” John B. Johnson said. “It’s just as wrong to let a guilty person go free, if there are other ways to handle their case, because of the potential that they can kill somebody else, or do something to somebody else.”
The belief runs counter to a legal maxim dating back to the 1700s by William Blackstone and espoused by the U.S. Supreme Court in 1895 to establish the presumption of innocence — that it is worse for an innocent person to go to prison than a guilty person go free.
Conservative DA
In the interview with The Current, Higgins pointed to a lack of trust in the office he inherited but never explicitly pointed the finger at his predecessor.
Higgins said he established citizens’ councils in Glynn and Camden counties where local leaders can have open dialogues with the DA about community issues.
The current DA also says voters should give him another term because of how he has managed the agency. After Higgins came into office in January 2021, the DA’s office did not have enough attorneys to fill the courtrooms, and even Higgins had to conduct ordinary court hearings to help with the shortages.
But since then his agency has added seven full-time prosecutors, something he attributes to poaching attorneys from agencies where a progressive prosecutor was elected — like Athens-Clarke and Chatham counties — and inviting them to come work in Brunswick.
“People have found a place to land here where they were not happy with the situation that they left from,” Higgins said. “Basically I’ve experienced the opposite of what these other jurisdictions have experienced.”
He said prosecutors want to work in the Brunswick Judicial Circuit because he runs a professional office that prosecutes crimes with vigor.
Higgins said decisions by some progressive DAs in Georgia and across the U.S. choosing not to prosecute some crimes over others, like nonviolent drug offenses, are wrongheaded.
“If it’s a crime, and we can prove it, we’re going to prosecute it,” Higgins said.
He claims that deciding not to prosecute a crime from the get-go deprives the system of the chance to intervene and “redirect that person away from a life of crime,” if the circumstances of the case support that.
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