The walls finally closed in on Jody Owens. The Hinds County district attorney — the Democrat elected to put criminals away in Mississippi’s capital city — spent Monday in a federal courtroom in Jackson admitting he was one of them, pleading guilty to conspiracy in a sweeping FBI bribery sting, according to Fox News, citing local station WAPT.
Prosecutors say Owens took at least $115,000 in cash, plus promises of future payouts, in exchange for using his office to push a downtown convention-center hotel through city government. The catch: the developers dangling the money were undercover FBI agents, and the deal was a 2022 sting built to see who in Jackson’s government could be bought. Owens, it turns out, could be.
What sank him was his own mouth. Undercover recordings, prosecutors allege, captured the district attorney calmly explaining how public officials could be bribed and how the dirty money could be laundered through businesses and campaign donations. Let that sink in — the man responsible for prosecuting corruption in Hinds County was coaching the people he thought were crooked developers on how to do it. He was indicted in October 2024 on conspiracy, federal program bribery, wire fraud, money laundering and making false statements, and on Monday he pleaded guilty to a single conspiracy count.
Then came the exit, and it was pure Washington. In a Facebook post announcing a resignation effective July 1, Owens called it “one of the most difficult decisions” he had ever made and said it “hurts beyond measure” to leave. “Serving as your District Attorney has been the privilege and honor of a lifetime,” he wrote, before asking supporters to “keep our family in your prayers.” Notice what’s missing: not one word of apology to the taxpayers he swore to serve, or to the county whose top law-enforcement job he treated like a cash register.
Owens was not the only one caught in the net. The same undercover operation swept up others in Jackson’s Democratic city government, including the mayor, in a corruption case that has hollowed out the leadership of Mississippi’s largest city. Owens is scheduled to be sentenced October 15 and faces up to five years in federal prison, a $250,000 fine and three years of supervised release.
This is a window into what happens when the people handed the power to enforce the law decide the law is for everyone but them. A prosecutor spent years deciding who in his community answered for their crimes, all while, prosecutors say, explaining on tape how to commit his own. He kept the title, the salary and the trust of the voters right up until the tape ran out. The honor of a lifetime, indeed.
Source: foxnews.com