PUBLISHER'S NOTE: The first part -"What happened to Rachel Gray (Twenty-two years after Arizona sent Barry Jones to Death Row, the state's case has fallen apart) - appeared on October 23, 2017. The second part - Death by Dereliction - "Tunnel vision: Arizona prosecutors double down on murder theory as the evidence crumbles around them" - recently appeared appeared on February 9, 2018. (Lilian Segura is a journalist and editor with a longtime focus on prisons, prisoners, and the failings and excesses of the U.S. criminal justice system — from wrongful convictions to the death penalty. She covered these and other issues most recently as an editor at The Nation, where she edited a number of award-winning stories. Previously she was a senior editor at AlterNet, where she was in charge of civil liberties coverage during the early days of Obama’s presidency.She has appeared on CNN International, MSNBC, Democracy Now! and several other news outlets. Her writing has been reprinted in numerous places, from prison publications to “The Best American Legal Writing” to, most recently, the collection “Against Equality: Prisons Will Not Protect You.” Liliana is on the board of the Campaign to End the Death Penalty and the Applied Research Center, a U.S. racial justice think tank.) The cases are of particular interest to this blog because...Because of their length they cannot be reduced. But here are some highlites:
Harold Levy: Publisher; The Charles Smith Blog;
GIST; Part One: "Since the day of his arrest in 1994, Barry Lee Jones has insisted he did not rape or kill his girlfriend’s 4-year-old daughter, Rachel Yvonne Gray. Jailed on the same day the child’s lifeless body arrived at a Tucson hospital, Jones admitted she’d been injured on his watch, repeatedly saying she had fallen from his parked yellow work van the day before, hitting her head. Jones said Rachel told him a little boy had pushed her out. But even if it was true, that did not explain the bruises covering her body, or the abdominal injury that took her life. Almost no physical evidence linked Jones to Rachel’s injuries — and there was nothing to show he was guilty of rape. But when children die under mysterious circumstances, early suspicion typically falls on the adults who were closest to them in their final hours. On that day, witnesses said, that person was Jones. He and Rachel’s mother, Angela Gray, were tried back to back in 1995; Gray was convicted of child abuse but acquitted of murder. Jones was sentenced to die. After more than 20 years insisting upon his innocence, Jones won a rare evidentiary hearing from a U.S. district judge, set to begin October 30. Attorneys with the Arizona Federal Public Defender’s Office plan to argue that Jones’s trial was fundamentally unfair, marred by ineffective assistance of counsel in violation of his Sixth Amendment rights. Moreover, they say, bad lawyering at the post-conviction level left the trial attorneys’ failures unaddressed, resulting in a horrible miscarriage of justice. If his lawyers succeed, Jones could win a new trial — or even be released from prison. Poor defense representation and a lack of physical evidence are both hallmarks of wrongful convictions. The files in Jones’s case reveal many more. They show a rush to judgment, tunnel vision by the Pima County Sheriff’s Department, and a shifting theory of the crime by the state. Prosecutors relied on the most dubious kinds of evidence, from flawed forensics to the eyewitness accounts of young children. Vital pieces of evidence were lost, concealed, or never collected to begin with. More recently, DNA testing on one key item has failed to implicate Jones."
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GIST: Part Two: "Medical experts testified that Rachel Gray’s fatal injury could not possibly have occurred within the window presented at trial."...(Detective) Pesqueira apologized. But patience was in short supply. Her investigation had sent a man to death row. For 23 years, that man had sworn he was innocent. There were good reasons to think he might be telling the truth, but prosecutors had fought to preserve his conviction. Now, revisiting her role as lead investigator, Pesqueira gave vexing testimony. There were just too many clues she had apparently missed; conspicuous leads she had failed to see...The investigative records in the Jones case were riddled with holes. Most alarming, there was no sign that Pesqueira ever sought critical information about how, exactly, Rachel was killed. The child had died as a result of a sharp blow to the abdomen that perforated part of her small intestine, the duodenum. Leakage from the tear caused a deadly condition called peritonitis, which, if left untreated, can lead to septic shock. To estimate when the blow occurred, a pathologist testified, one would need to thoroughly investigate when Rachel showed her earliest symptoms of illness. Pesqueira never did.The investigative records in the Jones case were riddled with holes. Most alarming, there was no sign that Pesqueira ever sought critical information about how, exactly, Rachel was killed. The child had died as a result of a sharp blow to the abdomen that perforated part of her small intestine, the duodenum. Leakage from the tear caused a deadly condition called peritonitis, which, if left untreated, can lead to septic shock. To estimate when the blow occurred, a pathologist testified, one would need to thoroughly investigate when Rachel showed her earliest symptoms of illness. Pesqueira never did...Instead, she had drawn conclusions based on her own first impressions at the hospital. “I do my own examination,” she told the grand jury in 1994. “Medical personnel are not in the room.” Given Rachel’s appearance — and the estimate that she had died in the early hours of May 2, 1994 — Pesqueira concluded she had been fatally beaten the day before. This made Jones the likeliest suspect. In a deposition before the 2017 hearing, Pesqueira was asked if she had ever identified anyone who might have hurt Rachel in the days before May 1. “I had no reason to believe [her injury] had gone that long, so no,” she said. If Pesqueira had expanded her investigation, she would have found plenty of alternative suspects."
Part One can be read at:
https://theintercept.com/2017/10/23/barry-jones-arizona-death-row-rachel-gray/
Part Two can be read at:
https://theintercept.com/2018/02/09/arizona-death-row-barry-jones-evidentiary-hearing/
PUBLISHER'S NOTE: I am monitoring this case/issue. Keep your eye on the Charles Smith Blog for reports on developments. The Toronto Star, my previous employer for more than twenty incredible years, has put considerable effort into exposing the harm caused by Dr. Charles Smith and his protectors - and into pushing for reform of Ontario's forensic pediatric pathology system. The Star has a "topic" section which focuses on recent stories related to Dr. Charles Smith. It can be found at: http://www.thestar.com/topic/c
