The Jones case: Justice comes decades later
6th February 2017 · 0 Comments
By Della Hasselle
Contributing Writer
For those who know him, Robert Jones is considered to be a religious man, a dedicated father and a talented artist.
He’s also known as a man who spent decades behind bars for an internationally famous crime, even though he and his attorneys say he was wrongly convicted.
The young painter and carpenter spent 23 years in a Louisiana prison for a series of armed robberies, rape and a murder he says he never committed. After winning release on bail in 2015, Jones last month secured his freedom when the state of Louisiana dropped all charges against him and vacated each of his prior convictions.
The victory came after more than a decade of court battles over a case marked by brutal violence, mistaken witness identifications and allegations of prosecutorial misconduct.
For Jones, the Jan. 26 hearing was also a birthday wish come true. He had turned 44 the day the district attorney’s office announced his freedom in court, after he had already spent more than half of his life behind bars.
“It’s a burden I’ve been carrying for many, many years,” Jones said after the hearing. “The burden is free. I’m light. I can fly.”
A violent crime spree
The case against Jones first began in 1992, after a British tourist named Julie Stott was killed while on vacation with her fiancé, Peter Ellis.
The two had been strolling the French Quarter after dinner and dancing when, according to reports, a man suddenly jumped out from the shadows and pointed a gun at them.
Detectives would later describe the case as an armed robbery gone wrong.
Shots were fired, and Stott was hit twice. According to James Stewart, the former NOPD detective who had first been assigned to the case, the shooter jumped in his car and sped off, leaving Ellis cradling a dying Stott in the middle of the road.
As Stewart describes it, the botched hold-up lasted less than a minute. The robber had ordered the couple to the ground, he said, but the two failed to react in time.
“Based on everything…Julie and Peter, they just became frightened,” Stewart said, according to a video interview published by BBC News in late 2015. “It’s not something they were used to seeing, at any level.”
Neither, apparently, was the British media. Almost immediately, the murder became an internationally famous crime marked by a flurry of coverage, with one paper even offering a hefty reward of $10,000 in exchange for information leading to an arrest.
Among several resulting Crimestopper tips was one that implicated Jones, according to Emily Maw, the director of Innocence Project New Orleans.
In the meantime, detectives were still making connections relative to the case, Maw said. And it started to become apparent to police, she said, that this crime had similarities to a brutal rape and robbery that had happened about a week before. They had been committed using the same car, police had found, and also had been carried out in the French Quarter.
It wasn’t Jones’ first time encountering the law, and police had his photo on file. So when the victim of the rape case came in to give a statement, they showed her Jones’ picture in a lineup.
Ultimately, the victim would pick Jones out of a lineup. But that was despite the fact that she initially said he had looked “too young” to be her attacker.
Moreover, the woman never mentioned a key detail about Jones, according to reports: that at the time, he had gold teeth.
Maw described it as a mistake in witness identification: “Everything that was done is now what we know you don’t do.”
Still, police arrested him. Jones was 19 when it happened. The way he describes it now, it was a shock because he said he “didn’t do any crime,” but at the same time, it was also somewhat normal. As he put it, police were “just doing their job” by arresting a suspect in a crime, and he figured that once they realized they had the wrong person, he’d be allowed to go home.
“Even at that stage, with the limited knowledge I had of the criminal justice system, I knew that because the charges were false they’d eventually go away,” Jones said. “That they’d eventually realize it and it would be OK.”
It didn’t quite happen that way. Jones remained behind bars, even when the case got more complex, and when it started to seem more questionable to detectives that he could have been responsible for the crimes.
A total of five attacks, all armed robberies or attempted armed robberies, had been reported in a short time span. One had actually happened after Jones has been arrested, Maw said, and all had involved a key piece of evidence: a burgundy car.
Ultimately, the clues would lead to a different suspect altogether. His name was Lester Jones. He had no relation to Robert Jones, and, if you ask Robert Jones, the two didn’t even know each other.
Moreover, police found that the car used in the crimes belonged to Lester Jones. He was also found wearing a medallion that had belonged to a friend of the rape victim’s, and a watch from another victim.
Lester Jones was eventually convicted of some of the crimes, including murder. But, according to Maw, because there was witness identification, even if it was faulty, there was pressure to implicate both Robert Jones and Lester Jones.
“By that point it’s too late,” Maw said about the witness picking Robert Jones’ photograph out of the pack. “The dye has been cast. She has selected him and he has become the face of this case.”
At first, Robert Jones was only indicted for the rape. Then, the case got even more complicated. A witness who had previously said he only saw a silhouette leaving the murder scene suddenly recanted his original story, according to Maw, and said that he could identify both Robert and Lester Jones as being active participants of the crime.
Maw said the new statement was “completely false,” largely because Stott’s boyfriend had never mentioned a second participant in the shooting or botched robbery.
“It was unquestionably based on perjury,” Maw said, about Robert Jones’ indictment for murder charges. “The witness completely changes his story. And the D.A. knew he had.”
When the state brought the rape case to trial, prosecutors argued that the two men had schemed together. Robert Jones, the jury had been told, had not only borrowed the car, but had handed the jewelry over to him after committing the rape, burglary and kidnapping.
The jury bought the story, and four years after Jones was initially arrested, convicted him. He was found guilty of one count of aggravated rape, one count of second-degree kidnapping, one count of aggravated crime against nature, and three counts of armed robbery, all stemming from a single incident on April 6, 1992.
Jones would later plead guilty to manslaughter in the homicide case. As he explained it, he was shocked and despondent over the verdict in the rape trial, he was just trying to get the sentencing over with.
“That really devastated me,” Jones said about the “guilty” verdict. “I was frustrated, I was mad. I was angry for awhile.”
A complex case
Jones didn’t stay depressed for long, however. Almost immediately after arriving at prison, he had what he described as a revelation.
It began, oddly enough, when he randomly picked up a rock that he said was just outside the prison fence.
“I kept that rock. And I said to myself, I said, ‘I want to be like this rock: strong, solid, intact, beautiful and on the other side,’ Jones recalled, smiling. “That was like a defining moment right there. I made the decision in my mind. It wasn’t quite figured out there, but that decision was in my mind. I wasn’t going to just die here.”
So Jones got to work. He went into prison with an 8th-grade education. By the time he had left, he had earned a GED, and gone on to take college courses online. He studied law, political science, journalism, marketing and accounting. He began writing letters pleading with people to investigate his innocence, and was soon using 100 stamps every two months. He was preparing, he said, for another chance in court.
“I wasn’t going to be that little boy in that situation, with all the legal jargon talked over my head,” Jones said, referring to the rape trial. “I was not going to be in that situation ever again.”
Innocence Project New Orleans agreed to work on his case in 2009. After unsuccessfully trying to get DNA evidence in attempts to prove scientifically that Jones wasn’t responsible for the crimes, he and his lawyers took a different tactic. They claimed that Jones had an ineffective assistance of counsel, arguing the jury should have heard all the evidence and that it was due to failures of state and defense that they didn’t.
The court, to his lawyers’ surprise, instead found there had been a Brady violation, or the violation of Jones’ due process through the prosecution’s failure to turn over evidence favorable to his case.
In 2014, more than two decades after Jones had been arrested, an appeals court overturned his original conviction. The court found prosecutors had withheld evidence that would have been favorable to Jones during his trial, including the fact that police believed at the time that Lester Jones was responsible for the spree of crimes, and that the witness had initially described a man who didn’t fit Robert Jones’ description.
Later, another piece of evidence would come to light: an internal memo written in 1996 showing that prosecutors knew before Robert Jones’ trial that there was no evidence linking him with crimes Lester Jones had been implicated for.
According to Maw, the victory was hard-won after a relentless pursuit of relief based on proving prosecutorial misconduct.
The Orleans Parish District Attorney’s office, however, had for two years still pursued a retrial for Jones, pointing to that original witness in the rape case.
And a spokesman for Cannizzaro said last month’s decision to drop Jones’ case “did not exonerate Robert Jones.”
“It is difficult to retry any case that is more than two decades old. The office, unfortunately, has concluded that it cannot at this time retry a complex case such as this,” Orleans Parish Asst. District Attorney Christopher Bowman said in a statement Jan. 26.
“Given the current epidemic level of violent crime in New Orleans, it is difficult for a systemically underfunded law enforcement agency such as the Orleans Parish District Attorney’s office to not only keep up with its current prosecutorial demands, but to also retry a more than 20-year-old case in which a defendant has been granted a new trial on account of something that occurred long before the current administration.”
Moving forward
Despite the decades lost behind bars, Jones insists he’s not resentful. He’s too busy, he said, enjoying his freedom again.
“It feels great. It’s giving me life again. There are so many things to do now, and I don’t have all these restrictions,” Robert Jones told The Louisiana Weekly. “I can’t wait to fulfill my civic duty and sit on a jury. Things that people maybe take for granted. I have those particular civil rights restored to me.”
These days, Jones spends a lot of time working at his job in carpentry. During a recent interview, he still had paint on his hands as he described his day-to-day: spending time with his children, grandchildren and aunt, creating paintings, exploring options in real estate and art sales on Etsy.
He’s also in the planning stages of starting a nonprofit with exoneree Jerome Morgan, who had also been serving a life sentence before being freed from prison.
Called the Free-Dem Foundation, the idea is to mentor young men and boys from “disadvantaged areas” before they get caught up in a life of crime, Jones said. He envisions a space with a gym and a library, where mentors can help with everything from practical advice to GED tutoring.
“We used to sit around and talk about this,” Jones said, recalling time he spent in prison with Morgan, formulating a plan for when they both got out. “We are really serious about what we are trying to do.”
In the meantime, Maw said she worries about more cases like Robert Jones that she says will inevitably come out of the woodwork in the future.
That’s in part, she said, because she agrees that Orleans Parish prosecutors are “woefully under-resourced.” But she also opines that Cannizzaro spends too much time and money on cases like Jones’, which she said should have been dropped about a decade ago.
“When you look at the culture Cannizzaro is setting, that he is willing to defend any conviction, what does that say about respect of the proceedings?” Maw questioned. “The tone he is setting by continuing to defend these cases is that the process doesn’t matter, that it is the result that is all that matters.”
This article originally published in the February 6, 2017 print edition of The Louisiana Weekly newspaper.
