photo by: Kim Callahan/Journal-World

Servando Martinez-Vazquez is pictured Thursday, June 27, 2024, at his trial for aggravated domestic battery and other charges in Douglas County District Court.

A Lawrence man on Friday was acquitted by a jury of choking a woman — his second such acquittal in Douglas County in less than three months.

Servando Martinez-Vazquez, 24, was tried this week after being charged with aggravated domestic battery by choking, felony criminal threat and misdemeanor domestic battery. The jury of nine men and three women heard testimony from a young woman claiming that he had barged into her west Lawrence apartment at 4 a.m. on Oct. 12, 2022, pushed her up against a wall, twisted her arm to make her drop her phone and grabbed her throat so that she couldn’t breathe.

Jurors ultimately found Martinez-Vazquez not guilty of the most serious charge of choking and also of the misdemeanor charge, but returned a guilty verdict on the criminal threat count. The woman had testified that Martinez-Vazquez threatened to beat her up if she called anyone to come get him from her apartment.

Jurors also saw a brief video that the woman surreptitiously made after she had fallen backward into a laundry basket during the confrontation. A man’s voice is heard in the video telling her to “stand up,” “shut the [expletive] up” and calling her names. Prosecutor Jenna Phelps emphasized several times that Martinez-Vazquez told the woman she was “going to get smacked around again.”

The woman testified that she had no physical injuries from the encounter, except for a scratch on her leg, where she had fallen into the basket, possibly by tripping. She described her injuries as “mainly mental.”

In the video, there is also the sound of laughter, which the woman explained by saying she was simply trying to deescalate the situation so that Martinez-Vazquez “would not get physical again.” She testified that the two of them went to bed after the incident  — she had to just “get through the night” — and that she retrieved her phone after he had fallen asleep and texted her therapist, who offered to call the police for her, but the woman chose to wait until later that day to make a report. She said Martinez-Vazquez had taken her phone because he didn’t trust her with it, although he had allowed her to use it to call in sick to work.

Defense attorney Razmi Tahirkheli criticized the state’s case, argued by Phelps and Deputy District Attorney David Greenwald, for being just “she said” accusations. He said no law enforcement personnel were called to corroborate whether witnesses in nearby apartments had heard the screaming and door-banging that the woman said had occurred, and he noted that the brief videos seen by the jury — another video was taken later in the day by the woman’s friend after Martinez-Vazquez had returned — did not show anyone being hit.

“Those two videos show you nothing,” he told jurors, adding that foul language is not a crime.

He characterized the woman’s report of the incident as a product of “age-old revenge, jealousy, heartbreak,” noting that the two had recently ended a long-term relationship and that Martinez-Vazquez was seeing someone else. He additionally noted that the woman said her memory was “fuzzy” about certain aspects of the night, which was almost two years ago and that she had “blocked a lot of that out.”

The jury got the case midmorning and had reached verdicts shortly after 1:30 p.m. Friday.

A different Douglas County jury in June acquitted Martinez-Vazquez of choking a different woman in October 2023, as the Journal-World reported.

A woman in that case testified that Martinez-Vazquez beat her with a sex toy after he found the toy in her nightstand and became enraged. In the course of the altercation — first verbal, then physical — the woman testified that Martinez-Vazquez choked her, broke her shower door, knocked a large hole in a wall and then, after she locked him out of the home, he violently kicked open her front door, causing $900 in damage.

Tahirkheli, who represented Martinez-Vazquez in that case as well, also suggested to that jury that the woman made the accusations because she was upset that Martinez-Vazquez was going to see another “girl.” He had argued that the redness on her face — photographed by a police officer — could have been caused by her crying rather than having been choked.

That jury of seven women and five men rejected the choking claim but found Martinez-Vazquez guilty of two misdemeanors: criminal damage to property and domestic battery. Judge Stacey Donovan, who also presided over this week’s trial, sentenced him to six months in the county jail for each offense, then suspended those sentences to 12 months of probation and ordered him to pay $932 in restitution plus a little over $300 in various court costs. She also ordered him to complete a domestic violence assessment and get a mental health evaluation.

Martinez-Vazquez’s sentencing for the criminal threat he was convicted of Friday is scheduled for Oct. 25

In 2022, a rape victim in a different trial told the jury that Martinez-Vazquez had refused to help her as another man, Ray Charles Atkins, raped her when she was 17. She testified that Martinez-Vazquez said, “That’s not my problem.” Atkins was convicted of rape and is now serving a 13-year sentence, as the Journal-World reported. Martinez-Vazquez was not charged with any crime in that case.