BACKGROUND: (Death Penalty Information Center. August 3, 2023.)..." His conviction was based largely on questionable eyewitness testimony from two 8-year-olds, combined with unreliable forensic testimony. A medical examiner who testified against Jones later gave contradictory testimony about the timing of the victim’s fatal injury that would have ruled out Jones as a suspect. Police failed to investigate evidence pointing to other suspects, and Jones’s defense team failed to examine alternative theories of the crime. Jones was also convicted of raping Gray, despite the lack of any evidence that the alleged rape occurred at the time she sustained her fatal abdominal injury. Judge Burgess found that both Jones’s trial lawyer and the lawyer Arizona appointed to represent him in his state post-conviction proceedings were ineffective, and that both failed to conduct professionally appropriate investigations into the case. He wrote that trial counsel “failed to perform an adequate pretrial investigation, leading to his failure to uncover key medical evidence that Rachel’s injuries were not sustained on May 1, 1994”—the day the prosecution said Jones raped and killed her—and unreasonably “fail[ed] to impeach the state’s other physical and eyewitness testimony.” Sylvia Lett, Jones’s former appellate attorney, summarized the judge’s findings, saying, “He saw the state’s investigation for what it was, which was shoddy, the defense investigation for what it was, which was nonexistent, and he said, ‘That’s not fair.’ And that’s how it’s supposed to work.”
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PASSAGE OF THE DAY: "His exoneration is the latest legal blow to Arizona's capital punishment system. It comes after recent U.S. Supreme Court rulings forced the state to revisit other death sentences and marks the 12th time an inmate on Arizona's death row has been exonerated since the 1970s. The most widely publicized such cases involved those of Debra Milke and Ray Krone. Milke was originally convicted in the 1989 murder of her 4-year-old son. Her conviction was thrown out in 2015 because prosecutors failed to disclose evidence that may have challenged testimony from a Phoenix police detective, who claimed that Milke made an unrecorded confession to him. Krone spent 10 years in prison in the 1991 rape and murder of a Phoenix bartender. The bite mark evidence that convicted him led to him being dubbed the "Snaggletooth Killer." In 2002, DNA evidence excluded Krone, and he was released."
STORY: "He was on death row for 29 years. His case ping-ponged through the courts. Now, he's free," by reporters Elena Santa Cruz and Miguel Torres, published by Arizona Republic, on 16 June, 2023. "Elena Santa Cruz is an Arizona native. In December 2022 she received her master's degree in investigative journalism from Arizona State University. Prior to that, she received her bachelor's degree in criminal justice, also from Arizona State University."
GIST: "Arizona has released a man from death row after he served 29 years for a crime in which he was wrongfully convicted.
Barry Jones, now 64, was sentenced in Pima County Superior Court to death after being found guilty of fatally assaulting Rachel Gray, a 4-year-old child, in 1994. He had been on death row since July 1995, according to prison records.
"He was released a couple hours ago and is with his legal team," Ethel Mwedziwendira, a spokesperson for Jones' legal team, said in an email to The Arizona Republic shortly after 3 p.m.
Jones became the first Arizona death row inmate to walk free since Debra Milke in 2015 and the fifth exonerated since 2000.
Statements from the Arizona Attorney General's Office and Pima County Attorney's Office described the chain of events that led to their agreement to vacate his death sentence. Neither office responded to requests for additional comment.
“After almost 30 years on death row for a crime he did not commit, Barry Jones is finally coming home,” Cary Sandman, a federal public defender whose office has represented Jones for more than 20 years, said in a prepared statement.
“Mr. Jones spent nearly three decades on Arizona’s death row despite compelling evidence that he was innocent of charges that he had fatally assaulted Rachel Gray.”
In 2018, a federal district court judge ordered that Jones’ convictions were to be vacated based on the compelling medical evidence that it was not Jones who caused Rachel Gray’s injuries. A unanimous panel of the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals affirmed that order.
But the U.S. Supreme Court ignored its own precedent and said federal courts had no power even to consider his case.
Despite the high court decision, the state of Arizona was able to reconsider the new evidence.
After review, the attorney general agreed that Jones' conviction and death sentence should be vacated and asked the Pima County Superior Court to vacate them both.
As a result, Jones agreed to plead guilty to second-degree murder because he neglected to take Rachel Gray to the hospital the night before she died, despite seeing how sick she was from an unknown fatal injury, according to a news release from the Pima County Attorney's Office.
Pima County Superior Court Judge Kyle Bryson spelled out the details in a June 15 court order.
"On or about May 1 to 2, 1994, under circumstances manifesting extreme indifference to human life, Barry Lee Jones recklessly engaged in conduct which created a grave risk of death and thereby caused the death of Rachel Gray, when he failed to seek or contributed to the failure to seek medical care for Rachel Gray," the court ruled.
"The court has imposed a sentence of 25 calendar years with credit for time served," the order stated, adding that Jones "is now eligible for release from prison. It is therefore ordered that the Arizona Department of Corrections, Reentry and Rehabilitation release (him) forthwith."
Jones was in custody at the Arizona State Prison Complex–Eyman in Florence, according to prison records. Officials there declined comment.
Jones was kept on death row because of the 2022 U.S. Supreme Court decision Shinn v. Ramirez.
In that case, the high court said federal courts had no power to consider Jones' case despite the evidence that proved he was wrongfully convicted and denied a "constitutionally just trial," Sandman said in the news release.
At Jones' trial in 1995, his court-appointed lawyer failed to conduct an investigation into whether Rachel Gray died as a result of an injury she sustained while in Jones' care, the news release stated.
The release stated Rachel Gray sustained her injuries when she was not in his care, but the jury never heard any of that evidence. It convicted him and recommended he be sentenced to death.
Reaction to release of 'an innocent man on death row'
Dale Baich, adjunct professor at Arizona State University's Sandra Day O'Connor College of Law, represented numerous capital defendants and witnessed 15 executions as a former federal public defender in Arizona. He called the state's death penalty system "byzantine," leaving little room for the substance of a case to determine the outcome.
"In Barry's case, the U.S. Supreme Court placed form over substance and avoided dealing with the merits of his proof of innocence," he said. "In the end, the attorney general and county attorney recognized the injustice of keeping an innocent man on death row and agreed to right this wrong."
Andrew Sowards, a retired criminal defense investigator from the Federal Public Defender Office, worked on the case. He said that in more than 20 years, he had never been more convinced of someone’s innocence.
Sowards launched a GoFundMe page to help support Jones now that he has been released after three decades. “Had he had a fair trial, that would have been easily proven. Yet his trial lawyers did no investigation into the case and were unprepared to defend Barry's life,” he wrote on the donation site.
Legal struggles continue in Arizona death penalty cases
With Jones now free, 110 people remain on Arizona's death row.
His exoneration is the latest legal blow to Arizona's capital punishment system.
It comes after recent U.S. Supreme Court rulings forced the state to revisit other death sentences and marks the 12th time an inmate on Arizona's death row has been exonerated since the 1970s.
The most widely publicized such cases involved those of Debra Milke and Ray Krone.
Milke was originally convicted in the 1989 murder of her 4-year-old son. Her conviction was thrown out in 2015 because prosecutors failed to disclose evidence that may have challenged testimony from a Phoenix police detective, who claimed that Milke made an unrecorded confession to him.
Krone spent 10 years in prison in the 1991 rape and murder of a Phoenix bartender. The bite mark evidence that convicted him led to him being dubbed the "Snaggletooth Killer." In 2002, DNA evidence excluded Krone, and he was released.
Twin U.S. Supreme Court rulings in February and March of this year forced the state to re-do the penalty-phase trials of 10 defendants, nine of them tried in Maricopa County.
In April, Jasper Rushing, 42, was sentenced to death for the second time in the murder of his prison cellmate 13 years ago, in the first Arizona capital case to be brought back since those rulings.
Legal experts said the Arizona Supreme Court's history of ignoring U.S. Supreme Court precedents could result in as many as 30 capital case defendants who could be eligible for resentencing hearings.
In April, a Maricopa County Superior Court judge declined to take action to allow Arizona's first execution of 2023 to proceed, after Aaron Gunches petitioned the Arizona Supreme Court to issue a warrant for his execution, which the high court granted.
Gov. Katie Hobbs, who took office in January, pledged not to carry out the sentence because she commissioned a review of the state's execution protocols.
The execution warrant elapsed, and Gunches remains on death row for the 2002 murder of Ted Price, whom he kidnapped, shot and dumped in the desert near the Beeline Highway."
The entire story can be read at:
PUBLISHER'S NOTE: I am monitoring this case/issue/resource. 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/charlessmith. Information on "The Charles Smith Blog Award"- and its nomination process - can be found at: http://smithforensic.blogspot.com/2011/05/charles-smith-blog-award-nominations.html Please send any comments or information on other cases and issues of interest to the readers of this blog to: hlevy15@gmail.com. Harold Levy: Publisher: The Charles Smith Blog;
SEE BREAKDOWN OF SOME OF THE ON-GOING INTERNATIONAL CASES (OUTSIDE OF THE CONTINENTAL USA) THAT I AM FOLLOWING ON THIS BLOG, AT THE LINK BELOW: HL
https://www.blogger.com/blog/post/edit/120008354894645705/47049136857587929
FINAL WORD: (Applicable to all of our wrongful conviction cases): "Whenever there is a wrongful conviction, it exposes errors in our criminal legal system, and we hope that this case — and lessons from it — can prevent future injustices.
Lawyer Radha Natarajan;
Executive Director: New England Innocence Project;
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FINAL, FINAL WORD: "Since its inception, the Innocence Project has pushed the criminal legal system to confront and correct the laws and policies that cause and contribute to wrongful convictions. They never shied away from the hard cases — the ones involving eyewitness identifications, confessions, and bite marks. Instead, in the course of presenting scientific evidence of innocence, they've exposed the unreliability of evidence that was, for centuries, deemed untouchable." So true!
Christina Swarns: Executive Director: The Innocence Project;
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YET ANOTHER FINAL WORD:
David Hammond, one of Broadwater’s attorneys who sought his exoneration, told the Syracuse Post-Standard, “Sprinkle some junk science onto a faulty identification, and it’s the perfect recipe for a wrongful conviction.”
https://deadline.com/2021/11/alice-sebold-lucky-rape-conviction-overturned-anthony-broadwater-1234880143/
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