Parts 1 and 2 identified the people, the relationships, and the documented caseload behind Ellis Law Group’s overlapping roles in Wayne County’s legal system. This is Part 3: the Wayne County District Attorney’s office.
All criminal cases in Wayne County are prosecuted by the District Attorney’s office. Five prosecutors. One hallway. One office. One boss: District Attorney Alfred J. Howell.
Brendan Ellis is one of those five. He’s a partner at Ellis Law Group, husband of the Honorable Jessica Ellis, and, per the April 2025 commissioners’ meeting agenda, solicitor for the Wayne County Auditor’s Office.
Jessica Ellis now sits as Magisterial District Judge for District 22-3-02, covering Honesdale (the county seat), Waymart, Prompton, Canaan, South Canaan, Cherry Ridge, and Texas townships. She runs preliminary hearings. Sets bail. Decides whether probable cause exists to push a case to Common Pleas. That call is the gateway to felony and misdemeanor prosecution in her jurisdiction.
The prosecution sitting across from the defendant? The DA’s office. Brendan Ellis’s office. Five desks. No units. No divisions.
Probable Cause Isn’t Paperwork
This is where the system decides if someone faces criminal prosecution. The MDJ weighs the Commonwealth’s evidence and rules on probable cause. It’s a constitutional protection: the line between an arrest and the full weight of the state. Bail gets set here. Freedom gets lost here. And if a case clears this stage, it moves to Common Pleas before Judge Edwards or Judge Meagher, both of whom have their own documented ties to the Ellis orbit. Trial, plea, sentencing: all of it rests on the foundation laid in this court. A cracked foundation cracks everything above it.
The person making that call in Honesdale is married to one of the five prosecutors who worked the case. Even when Brendan Ellis’s name isn’t on the file, he’s in the room. An office this small doesn’t keep secrets from itself. Prosecutors help each other prep cases, compile discovery, research legal issues, draft motions, review evidence, weigh in on strategy and charging. One name goes on the complaint. That doesn’t mean one person touched the file.
Rule 2.11(A)(1) of the MDJ Conduct Rules requires disqualification when impartiality “might reasonably be questioned.” Not proven compromised. Might reasonably be questioned. A defendant standing before Jessica Ellis is facing the office that employs her husband, who is her law partner, who shares her imputed obligations under Rule 1.10. Can that defendant trust the process?
Not one of them. All of them.
It’s Not Just Brendan’s Cases
Rule 2.11(A)(2)(b) is straightforward: mandatory disqualification when a spouse acts as a lawyer in the proceeding. That covers cases Brendan Ellis personally prosecutes.
Then there’s Rule 2.11(A)(6). A judge must step aside when she’s served as a lawyer in the matter, or was “associated with a lawyer who participated substantially” during their time together. Jessica Ellis was an ADA in this same five-person office until she took the bench. She didn’t leave a 300-prosecutor Philadelphia bureau where separation is plausible. She moved down the hall. The DA’s office and the MDJ court both sit inside the Wayne County Courthouse at 925 Court Street. Cases active when she left are cases she was associated with. The ADAs she worked beside are people she shared strategy, caseloads, and daily proximity with.
She said as much herself. In a May 2023 Happenings Magazine profile, she talked about going into labor at the office: “My husband and I were able to discuss what was happening on some of my cases before I went to the hospital.” No screening. No line between private and government work. Just “my cases,” passed to her ADA husband on the way out the door. When Brendan Ellis was sick, she covered his court schedule: “leaving me to juggle multiple meetings and court appearances for the both of us.” She called it seamless.
That was before she put on a robe. Rule 2.9 bars judges from discussing pending matters outside the presence of the parties. No ethics wall covers a marriage. No screening memo follows you home. She described a household where caseloads flow freely. She’s on the bench now. He’s still prosecuting. The dinner table didn’t move.
And forget the old cases for a second. Brendan Ellis isn’t a former ADA. He’s a current one. Right now. One of five prosecutors bringing charges across Wayne County. The DA’s office is the prosecuting party in each hearing, arraignment, and bail decision in Jessica Ellis’s court. His name doesn’t need to be on a file. He sits ten feet from the person who signed it. He knows the cases, the witnesses, the officers. Same building. Same morning briefing.
That’s not a problem with one case. That’s every criminal matter on her docket.
Alfred J. Howell’s Office, Alfred J. Howell’s Problem
Howell runs a five-prosecutor shop. He employed both Ellises at the same time. Jessica Ellis as ADA from April 2022. Brendan Ellis since 2019. Howell himself was an ADA under Janine Edwards before becoming DA: the same Edwards who now presides as President Judge over Common Pleas, where cases from Jessica Ellis’s bench land next. When Jessica Ellis filed for MDJ, Howell knew or should have known what it meant for his office. One prosecutor’s spouse would be the judge hearing preliminary hearings for the county seat.
The public record shows no screening order. No documented restriction keeping Brendan Ellis from working cases that originate in his wife’s jurisdiction. No explanation of how the office plans to handle this. The Legal Journal publishes criminal outcomes weekly. The DA’s name is on all of them. Whether a given case was prosecuted by Brendan Ellis, by someone who shares a desk with him, or by someone whose work he had access to: that follows each probable cause finding out of Jessica Ellis’s court. She doesn’t convict anyone. But her court is the constitutional step that decides whether someone gets prosecuted at all. A compromised probable cause determination sends a case up to Common Pleas, to trial, to a potential conviction, on a foundation no impartial judge ever tested.
Alfred J. Howell’s obligation under Pennsylvania law is not just to win cases. It’s to protect the integrity of the process. Keeping an ADA on staff whose wife is the judge hearing those cases, with no documented safeguard, invites a fair question: is the DA’s office protecting that integrity, or counting on nobody asking?
And there’s a dollars-and-cents side. Wayne County is small. Not rich. Three MDJ seats, one empty, one compromised. Each criminal case pushed out of Jessica Ellis’s court because of Brendan Ellis’s employment costs the system: judge time, scheduling, travel for defendants and witnesses and officers driving to a hearing in another part of the county that should have been held down the street. Has Alfred J. Howell considered what Brendan Ellis’s continued employment means for a county already stretched thin? Is one ADA salary worth the load it dumps on the courts, the scheduling office, the witnesses, and the one remaining judge absorbing the overflow? Nobody seems to have run those numbers.
One Judge Standing
Wayne County has three MDJ districts. Carney retired in January 2025. Her seat is empty or temporarily covered. Jessica Ellis’s seat is filled on paper but compromised across the criminal docket. That leaves Judge Jonathan J. Dunsinger. Thirteen municipalities in northern Wayne County. One satellite office in Damascus Township. He’s it. When Brendan Ellis is lead prosecutor on a case originating in Jessica Ellis’s district, that case can’t go before her. Under the rules, it goes before Jonathan J. Dunsinger. When any ADA from the five-person office Brendan Ellis sits in brings a case from Honesdale, the same question should apply.
A defendant arrested in Honesdale who should get a preliminary hearing down the street? That hearing now travels to Bethany or Damascus. Landlord/tenant dispute where Ellis Law Group represents one side? Rerouted. The person getting that scheduling notice has no idea why.
MDJs handle 85% of the cases entering Pennsylvania’s courts. Honesdale is the heaviest part of Wayne County’s docket. The county waited eighteen months to fill this seat. What it got was a judge who can’t hear the criminal docket, whose firm can’t step into her court on civil cases, and who appears to still be practicing law. The system didn’t gain a judge. It gained a bottleneck.
This article covers the criminal docket. But the criminal side is only half the problem. Ellis Law Group still handles civil cases across Wayne County, Jessica Ellis still appears to be listed as a practicing attorney, and twelve years of prior clients, opposing parties, and professional relationships create a recusal list nobody has catalogued.
“In my opinion,” Jessica Ellis told the River Reporter in 2025, “it wouldn’t be fair to juggle.”
The public record says the juggling never stopped.
None of this happened by accident. These are choices.
Why would Brendan Ellis keep his ADA position after his wife took the bench, knowing what it does to her docket and to the county? Why would Alfred J. Howell allow it, knowing his office can’t bring a clean case into the busiest MDJ court in his jurisdiction? And why would Jessica Ellis seek this seat in the first place, knowing she can’t hear a large share of what walks through the door? She’s a lawyer. She knows the rules. She cited them during her own campaign when she criticized other MDJs for juggling. These aren’t people who stumbled into an oversight. They picked these roles knowing the cost and chose not to disclose it.
Each criminal matter the Wayne County DA’s office brings before Jessica Ellis arrives with the same defect: the judge’s husband works in the prosecuting office, the judge’s firm shares his obligations, the judge left that office months ago, and the judge has described, on the record and in print, a household where case information moves without boundaries. The Constitution guarantees an impartial tribunal. That guarantee doesn’t depend on whether the defendant knows about the problem. Doesn’t depend on whether the judge means well. It depends on whether a reasonable person, knowing what we now know, would trust the process.
Until someone answers that, each Wayne County DA case that crosses her bench carries the question through the door.
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Sources: Wayne County Legal Journal (Vol. 16, No. 12, May 15, 2026), Wayne County government website (waynecountypa.gov), Wayne County Commissioners’ Meeting Agenda (April 11, 2025), Ellis Law Group website (ellislawgrouppc.com), Wayne County Bar Association directory (waynecountypalawyers.com), Pennsylvania Rules for Magisterial District Judges (Rules 2.9, 2.11, 3.10), PA Rule of Professional Conduct 1.10, Tri-County Independent (March 2025), River Reporter (May 2025), Happenings Magazine (May 2023), DA A.G. Howell LinkedIn (office staffing).