Arizona man freed after nearly three decades on death row
An Arizona man who spent nearly three decades on death row before the reversal of his conviction over the death of a four-year-old girl has been freed from prison.
Barry Jones’s release, ordered on Thursday, came after a Tuscon-area state court judge approved a deal between prosecutors and him which involved his pleading guilty to a lesser murder charge. According to prosecutors, a medical review of the case failed to conclude that Jones caused the girl’s fatal injury, and his pleading guilty to second-degree murder involves his failure to adequately seek emergency care for the victim.
He was sentenced to 25 years that he had already spent imprisoned, setting the stage for his release.
Jones’s attorney, Cary Sandman, told the Associated Press that the plea recognized how his client – now aged 64 – had spent much of his life on death row “despite compelling evidence that he was innocent of charges that he fatally assaulted” Rachel Gray.
Nonetheless, as pointed out in a statement from the Innocence Project, Jones’s ordered release had no effect on the US supreme court’s refusal last year to give him the chance to prove that his constitutional right to competent legal representation was compromised when a previous defense lawyer failed to investigate medical, forensic and witness testimony which undermined the charges against him.
“With this decision … the supreme court left thousands of people in the nightmarish position of having no court to hear their credible claims of innocence,” the criminal justice reform non-profit organization’s statement said.
Jones in May 1994 drove Rachel and her mother – his girlfriend at the time – to a hospital whose staff soon pronounced the child dead. Investigators determined Rachel had died from a small bowel laceration which resulted from blunt abdominal trauma.
Authorities accused Jones of beating and raping the girl, leading to his being arrested, convicted and sentenced to execution. Prosecutors relied on junk science to argue that there was compelling evidence showing Rachel’s injuries occurred a day before she died while in the sole care of Jones, and his trial lawyer did not challenge or even investigate that contention.
Jones appealed his conviction. Experts ultimately found evidence that Rachel’s deadly injury had actually occurred before the second-to-last day of her life while she was not in Jones’s care.
A 2017 ruling from federal judge Timothy Burgess then concluded that Jones’s prosecution amounted to “a rush to judgment”.
The judge ordered that Jones either be released or retried, and an appeals court upheld that decision. Yet the US supreme court reversed that ruling last year, with Justice Clarence Thomas writing that the federal legal system is generally prohibited from considering new evidence of what is known as evidence of ineffective assistance of counsel.
Jones remained one of more than 110 death row prisoners in Arizona until his legal team and prosecutors struck the plea deal leading to his release. Essentially, in exchange for gaining his immediate release, Jones agreed to concede that he “failed to seek or contributed to the failure to seek medical care for Rachel Gray”, Arizona state court judge Kyle Bryson wrote in a ruling he handed down on Thursday.
The local top prosecutor, Laura Conover, said Jones’s deal balanced “the rule of the law and … holding someone accountable for the death of an innocent four-year-old child”.
“Mr Jones has been held more than accountable,” Conover said in a statement released to reporters.
Source: The Guardian US
