Jody Owens, the former Hinds County district attorney, was sentenced Thursday to 41 months in federal prison for his role in the Jackson bribery scheme, with the judge calling him the ringleader of the whole operation.
U.S. District Judge Daniel Jordan III handed down the sentence inside the Thad Cochran federal courthouse in Jackson, Mississippi, on November 5. On top of the prison time, Owens was ordered to pay a $100,000 fine. Whatever he has not paid by the time he gets out, he will pay off at $200 a month until the balance is gone. He has been ordered to report to prison on January 4, 2027.
The judge did not hold back about who Owens was when all of this happened. Jordan pointed out that Owens was the top law enforcement officer in Hinds County, a man who swore an oath to uphold the law. According to the judge, Owens solicited $250,000 in bribes to rig what should have been a fair and open bidding system for city contracts. Prosecutors said Owens actually accepted at least $115,000 in cash and promises of future benefits. Jordan described his decision as somber, but said he still believed Owens had a bright future ahead of him.
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Before the sentence came down, Jody Owens stood up and apologized to his family, the court and his former colleagues at the district attorney’s office. He called his own actions foolish and repugnant.
“I can’t begin to tell you the shame I feel,” Owens told the court. “People trusted me, and I treated that trust with contempt.”
He also spoke about what the case did to his family name, telling the judge that his son, his father and his great grandfather all carried versions of the name now attached to a federal corruption case.
The scheme itself centered on a plan to build a convention center hotel in downtown Jackson. Undercover FBI agents posed as real estate developers from Nashville looking to land the project. Prosecutors said Owens, along with former Jackson Mayor Chokwe Antar Lumumba and former City Councilman Aaron Banks, took money from those fake developers in exchange for favorable treatment when the city decided who would get the contracts.
The details in the indictment read like a movie. According to the charging documents, Owens, Lumumba, Owens’ cousin Sherik “Marve” Smith and the supposed developers flew to Fort Lauderdale, Florida, on a private jet that the FBI paid for. When agents raided Owens’ office and the downtown Jackson cigar shop he owns, they seized about $20,000 in cash. About $9,900 of that money had serial numbers proving it came straight from the undercover developers.
Owens, Lumumba and Banks were indicted in November 2024, which makes Thursday’s sentence land nearly two years to the day after the charges first came down. Owens originally faced eight counts and looked like he was preparing an entrapment defense, which is when a defendant argues that the government pushed them into committing a crime they would not have committed on their own. He dropped that fight this summer and pleaded guilty in June to a single count of conspiracy, just two weeks before his trial was set to begin.
The fallout for Jody Owens did not start with the sentence. He resigned as district attorney, a job he was first elected to in 2019, and the Mississippi Supreme Court later disbarred him, meaning he can no longer practice law in the state.
Owens was not the only one facing the judge Thursday. Banks was sentenced later that afternoon and received 45 months, four months more than Owens. Lumumba, who also pleaded guilty to conspiracy, is scheduled to be sentenced on November 20 and could face between 37 and 46 months in prison. Two others tied to the case, former Councilwoman Angelique Lee and Smith, are still waiting to learn their sentences.
For a city that has spent years dealing with water crises and a shrinking budget, watching its former mayor, a former councilman and its former top prosecutor all plead guilty to taking bribes is a gut punch. The man who was supposed to be charging people with crimes in Hinds County is now headed to federal prison himself.
