CHAMPAIGN, Ill.
In the almost 14 months David Lewis spent in a Danville jail, he missed Christmas. He missed his 18-year-old twins' basketball and softball games, not to mention their high school graduation.
While Lewis sat behind bars, facing almost 50 felony charges alleging he used his position as a part-time police officer in Belgium to force himself on strippers, his 2 1/2 year-old son grew from infant to toddler.
"I missed fifty percent of his life," Lewis said Tuesday, a day after walking out of a Vermilion County court guilty of four misdemeanors as part of a deal with prosecutors, but a free man.
Prosecutors dropped scores of felony counts, ranging from armed violence to aggravated criminal sexual assault, after one of Lewis' accusers admitted lying to police about him. Belgium is south of Danville, just west of the Indiana border.
The deal doesn't change prosecutor Michael Vujovich's belief that Lewis was guilty as originally charged.
"Do I believe he did this stuff? Yes," Vujovich, who works for the Illinois appellate prosecutor's office, said by phone Tuesday. "I think for the sake of the community, it ought to be a comfort to them to know he will never wear a uniform again, that he will never wear a badge or carry a gun."
Under the deal, the 46-year-old Lewis pleaded guilty Monday to two counts of attempted obstruction of justice and two counts of attempted official misconduct, both Class A misdemeanors. Lewis, according to the charges, kissed one of the women while on duty and falsely wrote into his police activity log that he picked her up at her home because she was helping with a criminal investigation.
Lewis was sentenced to time served in jail plus 240 days of unsupervised probation and can never again work as a police officer.
Lewis was arrested in April 2007 and charged with 49 felony counts after the seven women, most of whom were dancers at the Play Pen strip club in Belgium, accused him of forcing himself on them. Some of the women said he was armed and on duty at the time.
The case against Lewis was substantially weakened when one of the women he was accused of abusing said she lied to police.
Amy Dow admitted that she lied about Lewis only after he was convicted last October of official misconduct and criminal sexual abuse of one of the other women. Based on Dow's change of heart, Lewis was acquitted at a second trial in April.
Dow's accusations were behind 15 of the charges against Lewis, Vujovich said.
"She comes in at the second trial saying, 'Oh, what I told the police officers was all a lie and what I told the grand jury was a lie,"' Vujovich said.
Lewis' attorney, Mark Christoff of Danville, said Vujovich called him last Friday and they negotiated a deal over the weekend, finalizing the terms Monday morning.
"I absolutely believe we would have won at trial," Christoff said. "When they offered us a plea deal that did not involve any additional jail time, that did not involve a felony conviction, it basically made it not worth the risk of going to trial."
Vujovich handled the case because of a conflict involving the Vermilion County state's attorney's office. According to court testimony, federal agents had previously contacted Lewis with questions about a member of the office's staff.
Lewis said he's now living with his family at his mother's home in Danville.
He hopes to get his old, full-time job back as at a Koch Industries fertilizer plant in Crawfordsville, Ind.
If not, he isn't sure what he will do next or what kind of luck he'll have in the job market. He isn't a felon, but he points out that his case generated a fair amount of news media attention.
"You Google my name," he said, "and I can imagine what an HR person's opinion of me is when I go to get a job."
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