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Finally, it was the man at the center of the whole affair, alone before the jury.
After six weeks of testimony and evidence — and nearly five years after he was first charged — St. George businessman Jeremy Johnson delivered an evidence-filled but emotional plea to federal court jurors, asking them to return a verdict of not guilty to 86 charges related to alleged bank fraud.
"I've waited for five years, for five years, to talk to you, to ask you to let me go home," Johnson said, as he tearfully had the last word from the defense before the jury began deliberations.
"You're the only thing that stands between, between us and completely destroyed lives," he said in closing arguments in the trial where he's been acting as his own attorney.
The U.S. District Court jury of nine men and three women began its deliberations just after 10 a.m. Friday before disbursing at 2:30 p.m., as scheduled. The jury is expected to reconvene Monday for more deliberations.
The jurors are tasked with rendering verdicts on charges of bank fraud, submitting false documents to a bank, money laundering and conspiracy against Johnson and co-defendants Scott Leavitt and Ryan Riddle, who were managers at Johnson's I Works company.
The defendants face a maximum of up to 30 years in prison, though it's unlikely they would receive such a stiff sentence.
The verdict, expected next week, will be the culmination of an odyssey in the federal criminal-justice system for Johnson, who made millions of dollars selling products online only to see the Federal Trade Commission move in and seize all his assets as part of a lawsuit filed in December 2010.
Johnson was arrested in June 2011 on a single mail fraud count, but then, when he and prosecutors failed to complete a plea deal in December 2012, the government charged Johnson and added four other former managers at I Works in a wide-ranging indictment.
Johnson's legal troubles took a back seat for a while to the political scandals that erupted in 2013, when he alleged that former Attorney General John Swallow had helped arrange in 2010 what Johnson characterized as a bribe of then-U.S. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., to stall the FTC investigation.
Since then, Swallow has resigned. He and his predecessor, former three-term Attorney General Mark Shurtleff, face corruption-related charges in state court. Both have pleaded not guilty.
Through four weeks of testimony in U.S. District Court for Utah, government prosecutors alleged Johnson and the others conspired to defraud Wells Fargo Bank when they submitted applications for new accounts using the names and personal information of employees and family members.
That was necessary, the government said, because accounts from Johnson's I Works company had been placed on credit card company lists of bad merchants after numerous chargebacks and Johnson allegedly needed to conceal that he was behind new account applications.
The issue of a conspiracy to conceal information is where Johnson attacked the government's case, mostly using the prosecutors' own evidence.
Standing directly in front of the jury box, Johnson displayed emails and other documents that he said show that a processor and a sales agent for Wells Fargo Bank were fully aware that I Works was behind the 281 account applications presented as evidence in the case.
"The government will have you believe that we wanted to hide, that they couldn't know that I wasn't involved," Johnson said. "Where's the evidence that we did that? The evidence shows exactly the opposite."
As he ended his closing argument, which lasted a bit more than an hour, Johnson became emotional, choking up as he tried to get his final words out.
"Please don't look just at the evidence the government wants you to see," he said. "Look at the all the evidence and let me go home."
Assistant U.S. Attorney Robert Lunnen then got the last word and asked jurors to apply the evidence to the law "without emotion, without pity, without bias or any other undue influence."
Lunnen said that while Johnson had told jurors that prosecutors wanted them to look only at a select few pieces of evidence, he urged them to "look at all the evidence" and cautioned them against accepting the argument that "somehow this is everyone else's fault except the defendants'."
As has happened before in the trial, U.S. District Judge David Nuffer and defense attorney Marcus Mumford clashed, this time after the government raised an objection that Johnson was straying beyond the evidence in the case.
Nuffer also chided Johnson several times, once when he put up a photo of himself and his family on screens seen by the jury and once when he told the jury to pay attention to how difficult it was for the defense to get documents admitted as evidence.