SUPPORTERS PUSH AS JOE LOPEZ'S PAROLE HEARING NEARS

By Juan Montoya
It will be 10 years this November that legendary Grupo Mazz frontsman Joe Lopez was incarcerated after a jury found him guilty of the molestation of a 13-year-old relative at his Rancho Viejo home and on the charge of aggravated assault of a child and sentenced him to 20 years in prison.
The jury also ordered 8 1/2 years for a second count of aggravated assault of a child, and four years for indecency with a child. The terms are to run concurrently.
Now, with the 10-year anniversary of incarceration at the Ramsey Unit 1, in Rosharon, south of Houston, he will become eligible for parole.
Supporters nationwide say that Lopez's conviction should never have taken place because it was fraudulently obtained through the collusion between defense attorneys and convicted Cameron County District Attorney Armando Villalobos. In fact, some, from far away as Ohio, say they will write the parole board chairman urging that the conviction be reexamined in light of Villalobos' own conviction on multiple charges of racketeering and corruption, spanning the time of Lopez’s trial.
Advocates say that the Joe Lopez case should have been included in the indictment because of connections between Villalobos and one of Joe’s defense attorneys, Michael Trejo.
“Testimony in the case of convicted 404th District Judge Abel Limas...indicated that Villalobos used Michael Trejo as a conduit for kickbacks from a personal injury case only three months before the Lopez case.”
If Joe was a victim of the ‘Cash for Court Favors’ corruption, his case should have been included in the charges against Villalobos, so in a sense the federal prosecutors were remiss in their duties," asserts Joyce Jedlicka, a Lopez supporter from Kirtland, Ohio.
That Trejo, who was supposed to be an adversary against Villalobos had just three months before Lopez's case came to court acted as a conduit between a law firm to pay Villalobos $156,000 as a "referral" on a wrongful death case of one of his relatives, raises serious question of whether there was a clear conflict of interest. That he had been chosen as a confidential conduit indicates that he had a close personal relationship with the convicted D.A. at the time he was Lopez's defense attorney.
Jedlicka and Lopez supporters say that former Assistant U.S. Attorney Michael Wynne, who prosecuted the crooked DA Armando Villalobos, has been trying to exonerate the singer, but he has met with many obstacles.
Among these is the reluctance of the victim – who was 13 and pregnant by her adult boyfriend from Baytown at the time the charges were raised against Lopez – to meet with him and recant the charges.
Another is Villaobos' own reluctance to meet with Wynne and get to the bottom of the story.
On June 7, 2014, current Cameron County DA Luis Saenz told the Brownsville Herald that he had released the evidence but it seemed to be a dead end because Wynne learned that the
"evidence" was just a pair of shorts improperly seized from the Lopez laundry long after the
alleged crime. There was never any chain of evidence even linking the shorts to the allegations.
Thus they could easily have borne DNA evidence pertaining to Lopez, without any crime having
been committed.
This was not the only instance that the Villalobos administration has been accused of using fabricated DNA evidence. At the trial of murderer Amit Livingston, a Texas Ranger testified that some of the evidence presented there may have been made up as well.
During the Villalobos racketeering trial, former Texas Ranger Lt. Rolando Castañeda, who played a key role in the Livingston investigation, said from the witness stand that Livingston's defense attorneys received a letter from Asst. DA Karina Bazarra informing them that their office failed to find any semen on the jeans of the victim.
Later, under cross examination by Asst. U.S. Attorney Wynne, Castañeda said the evidence was "made up."
In fact, he testified that DNA evidence on the victim's pants was never tested. Villalobos did not know if the victim was wearing the jeans the day of murder. The report indicated there was semen on the pants, but that there was no testing. In fact, they were never turned over to the defense until one week before the trial. By that time, the DNA could have degraded. Theoretically, if handed over to them in time, it could have provided the defense with exculpatory evidence if the DNA proved to be that of a third party.
To Lopez supporters, this amounts to prosecutorial misconduct they said may have occurred in the case of the singer.
"The shorts they say they found Joe's DNA were mingled with the clothes of the rest of the family and kept in a plastic trash bag for more than three months," said a relative. "Now that we know that Trejo was in cahoots with Villalobos on the death case, it makes us even more determined to get the evidence we are hoping will exonerate Joe."
In a supplement to the Villalobos indictment, "the government alleged that Villalobos referred a 2005 civil case involving his sister-in-law’s death to the law firm of Michael Cowen and Conrad Bodden. The case was settled for a substantial amount in April 2006. According to prosecutors, Villalobos received a referral fee in two checks, one for $60,000 and the other for $96,000.
The $60,000 check was made payable to attorney Michael Trejo, who was not involved with the case, but funneled the money to Villalobos, the court record states."
In his interview with the local daily, DA Saenz seesm to have been reconsidering his former position on the DNA evidence, remarking in the article, “There were some improprieties that had been engaged in by that administration [Villalobos], so one had to think maybe this was one of them. So if there were some improprieties, I need to know. Some people belong in jail, and if this individual does not belong in jail then he shouldn’t be there.”