Man released from jail after police find his lookalike with the same name
For 17 years, Richard Anthony Jones vehemently claimed his innocence and to add a little strange into the mix, he repeatedly heard there was another prisoner who looked just like him. The oddest part wasn’t that they looked alike but that they also shared the same first name.
Jones didn’t see the man himself but passed along the information to lawyers who began to investigate. Eventually, they came to the conclusion that Jones was innocent just as he had claimed for years.
This last Wednesday they handed the case over to a Johnson County judge and on Thursday Jones was a free man. He has spent almost 17 years in prison for a 1999 robbery in Roeland Park.
At the hearing on Wednesday, witnesses were not able to look at the two photos of the men and say for certain which one was the perpetrator. Based on this and other new evidence Judge Kevin Moriarty ordered Jones released.
The judge was not willing to say the other man committed the crime but he did say that with the new evidence reasonable jurors would not have been able to convict.
— Police caught kicking innocent bystander while he’s on fire —
During the new investigation that began when Jones contacted the Midwest Innocence Project and the Paul E. Wilson Defender Project at the University of Kansas several new pieces of evidence were found. This was important because there was no physical evidence against Jones in the first place, the conviction was based on the testimony of eyewitnesses.
He gave an alibi defense, stating that he was with his girlfriend and family in Kansas City the day of the robbery but with the eyewitness testimony the jury found him guilty and he was sentenced to over 19 years in prison.
As soon as the Innocence Project lawyers showed the images of the two men to the victim, two witnesses and the prosecutor, all four of them said they couldn’t tell the men apart.
Then, last December they filed legal action that led to his release.
“Richard Jones has presented sufficient evidence to meet the under of manifest injustice (under Kansas law),” his attorneys said in their motion to seek his release. “Mr. Jones was convicted solely on eyewitness testimony that has been proven to be inherently flawed and unreliable.”
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