Two candidates for county prosecutor do not see eye to eye on the current officeholder’s jury trial wins.
Prosecutor Joe Villanueva is running for his first full term in office. He was selected via caucus in September 2019 after former prosecutor Brad Cooper was removed from office due to his felony conviction. Villanueva, who was chief deputy prosecutor at the time, won the caucus against five other candidates.
Lance Hamner, former county prosecutor and Superior Court 3 judge, is challenging Villanueva. Hamner previously served as Johnson County prosecutor from 1991 to 2008. He resigned as Johnson County Superior Court 3 judge in February to run for prosecutor.
Villanueva has spent his entire 22-year legal career at the prosecutor’s office. He has taken steps over the past two years to work more closely with law enforcement, including having prosecutors at every major crime scene, having regular meetings with police administration, providing numerous training seminars and legal updates and doing “ride alongs” with officers, he said.
Both Villanueva and Hamner, however, have offered different numbers for the number of cases won at the office under Villanueva.
Since Villanueva formally became prosecutor in September 2019, his office has won outright convictions in seven felony jury trials — outright meaning the defendant was convicted on all original charges. He has also won convictions in two other felony jury trials, however, in those trials the jury convicted the defendant on at least one, but not all charges. Additionally, he has won two convictions in cases where the defendant was convicted on lesser charges, Johnson County court data shows.
Villanueva’s office also won a felony case in Hamilton County, where the Johnson County Prosecutor’s Office acted as special prosecutors, he said.
During the same period, Villanueva’s office also lost three cases and had one mistrial. The mistrial case was eventually resolved through a plea agreement, where the defendant plead to the lesser of two charges, data shows.
Villanueva said the prosecutor’s office has won 17/21 jury trials as of April 5, though not all are outright wins. Of those, three were for misdemeanors and two were won before the September 2019 caucus.
One misdemeanor trial was for felony theft, but the jury reached a verdict for misdemeanor theft. The charge was ultimately upgraded to a felony due to prior convictions, data shows.
Additionally, there was the felony trial Johnson County won for Hamilton County, court data shows.
Two other trials Villanueva considers as jury victories ended with a plea agreements. In the first case, a felony drug charge, the defendant stopped proceedings mid-trial and plead guilty. In the other, a misdemeanor gun case, the jury was about to be selected and the defendant plead guilty before the trial began, he said.
“Our people were there with witnesses ready to go, and the trial was either ready to start or actually started. I view these as completely different than someone pleading guilty at a regular court hearing,” Villanueva said in an email.
Villanueva’s numbers count two wins before he was selected via caucus to fill the prosecutor’s seat, but after he had became acting prosecutor, data shows. Villanueva served as acting prosecutor from April 2019 to July of that year and was the interim prosecutor from July to September. He was selected via the caucus to fill Cooper’s term in September 2019.
The three trials Villanueva lost were all sex crime cases. Historically, these types of cases have much lower conviction rates than others because they often lack physical evidence and rely more on the victim’s testimony, he said last month.
“But we still bring those to trial because we believe in what the victim said happened and we take our best shot,” Villanueva said.
Hamner does not have the same view. Hamner said earlier this year he was disappointed at how the prosecutor’s office has fared in recent years, and failings its mission to fairly and effectively prosecute criminals.
The prosecutor’s office has lost an “unacceptably high” number of cases at trial, Hamner said.
Hamner disagrees with Villanueva’s assertion during an interview on March 1 that he had won 16 of 19 jury trials. He did not know where Villanueva was getting his numbers, he said.
Hamner only counts jury victories as wins when a defendant is found “guilty as charged,” or found guilty on all counts. From September 2019 to March of this year, there were only seven felony jury trial verdicts that meet this definition, Hamner said via email.
There were another two trials which resulted in a guilty verdict on only a single count, a partial win in Hamner’s eyes, he said.
“Even with those partial wins, that’s still only 64% in the win column,” Hamner said via email, referring to felony trials after Sept. 2019 that resulted in at least a partial win.
Villanueva has won about 47% of jury trials with an outright conviction, including felonies and misdemeanors since April 2019. This percentage excludes the Hamilton County case, as it was not a win for Johnson County residents, and excludes two cases from when Villanueva was acting prosecutor.
Without the cases won before the caucus, Villanueva’s trial wins would be 57%, including both felonies and misdemeanors.
Though three of trials were resolved through plea agreements for lesser charges, Villanueva did get a conviction, data shows.
