Jody Owens, the man Hinds County elected to prosecute crime, will go to federal prison for 41 months. Aaron Banks, a Jackson city councilman who took $10,000 in cash from men he believed were developers, will serve 45. Both were sentenced Thursday in the FBI sting that has reshaped the leadership of Mississippi’s capital.
Jackson is a city of roughly 150,000 people, about four in five of them Black. The three officials who pleaded guilty in this case, Owens, Banks and former Mayor Chokwe Antar Lumumba, were among the most visible Black leaders in Mississippi. The residents they were elected to serve now have to rebuild trust in City Hall and in the district attorney’s office at the same time.
U.S. District Judge Daniel P. Jordan III imposed the sentences. Owens, the former district attorney, also owes a $100,000 fine. Banks, a former council president, owes $15,000, with three years of supervised release, and he stays free on bond until he reports to prison on Jan. 4, 2027.
The case grew out of an operation that ran from October 2023 to May 2024. Undercover FBI agents posed as developers who wanted a downtown hotel next to the convention center and offered officials money and favors to help it through. Banks took $10,000 in cash, an employment contract for his daughter and a personal driver, and was seeking $50,000 in all, according to WLBT’s account of the hearing.
Banks also threatened to hold up city employees’ pay to push the project. The judge named that. “City employees don’t make a lot of money, and the idea of holding up their money to help these developers so you can get $50,000 is a problem,” Jordan said, according to WLBT. He added: “This is not a one-time event, based on what I’ve seen.”
Banks got more time than Owens, whom the judge treated as a ringleader of the scheme, because of his criminal history. Two earlier DUI convictions, in 2011 and 2024, put him in a higher guideline category, with an advisory range of 51 to 60 months. Jordan said he could not justify sentencing Banks within that range when Owens received 41.
Banks addressed the court. “I had choices, and I made wrong ones. For that, I am deeply sorry. I am sorry to the citizens who placed their confidence in me,” he said.
Owens resigned as district attorney after pleading guilty to conspiracy to commit bribery, and the Mississippi Supreme Court has disbarred him. It disbarred Lumumba in October. Lumumba pleaded guilty to conspiracy on July 6 and was supposed to be sentenced with the others. His hearing was pushed back and is now set for Nov. 20, according to SuperTalk Mississippi.
None of this is a defense of the men involved. Officials who sell their votes steal from the people who sent them, and the cost lands first on residents with the least cushion, including the city workers whose paychecks Banks was willing to use as leverage. Jackson’s voters were let down by the people they trusted with the most power in the county.
Jackson now has a vacant prosecutor’s office to fill and a mayor’s office to rebuild. Lumumba faces the judge on Nov. 20.
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