EL PASO, TEXAS (KFOX14/CBS4) — The El Paso City Council voted Monday to hire consultants to handle a civil rights lawsuit against the city tied to the case of Daniel Villegas, who was falsely imprisoned for two decades.
As KFOX14/CBS4 previously reported, Villegas was convicted of capital murder in 1995 and sentenced to life in prison for the 1993 drive-by shooting deaths of Armando Lazo and Robert England. The conviction was later overturned in 2013, and Villegas was acquitted in 2018. Upon his release, Villegas filed a lawsuit in 2015 against the city of El Paso and several El Paso Police Department officers who handled the case, citing EPPD’s actions “impaired his rights.”
At a City Council meeting on Monday, a motion to hire consultants for the civil rights lawsuit passed unanimously. According to the motion, the consultants would take “all necessary steps, including the execution of any required documents.”
However, it is unclear who the consultants will be and how much they will cost the city.
The city’s action comes just before a jury trial over the lawsuit is scheduled for August. In 2025, U.S. District Judge David Guaderrama ruled that Villegas could go to trial on some of the allegations in his lawsuit, including that police leadership demonstrated to homicide detectives that “it would tolerate deliberate dishonesty and constitutional violations so long as officers were able to make arrests for crimes.”
Guaderrama ordered the trial to take place on August 31 and is expected to last for three weeks.
READ 2025 RULING
What Happened in the Villegas case
In 1993, Villegas was 16-years-old when he was arrested and charged with killing 18-year-old England and 17-year-old Lazo. Villegas had confessed during an interrogation but later recanted, and he has maintained his innocence.
During his interrogation, Villegas alleges, Detective Alfonso Marquez hit him, threatened him with other beatings, and said he would put him in an adult jail where he would be raped if he didn’t cooperate.
While his first trial in the case ended in a mistrial, he was convicted in 1995 without any physical evidence tying him to the murder. His attorneys have routinely shown that the false confession was found to be factually inaccurate. A state judge later agreed, and his confession was thrown out.
In December 2013, an appeals court overturned his conviction, and in January 2014, Villegas was released from prison.
According to the 2015 lawsuit, Villegas accuses EPPD of trying to “secure a confession at any cost.”
It alleges that detectives threatened, tortured, and violated the constitutional rights of several young teenage boys to secure false statements and false confessions.
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