Man wrongly imprisoned for 17 years due to lookalike seeks $1.1m compensation

Nearly two decades ago, Richard Jones was convicted of aggravated robbery after being picked out of a line-up by witnesses who said he stole a cell-phone in a Walmart parking lot in Kansas.

But while Mr Jones, who maintains he is innocent, was serving his 19-year sentence at Lansing Correctional Facility, inmates told him he looked like a prisoner named Ricky.

That resemblance would eventually lead to his freedom.

Last year, a judge threw out Mr Jones’ conviction after the original witnesses were shown side-by-side photographs of the two men and said they could not tell them apart. Now Mr Jones, 42, is trying to get his life back on track.

Earlier this week, he filed a petition in the 10th Judicial District Court of Kansas, seeking more than $1.1 million (£850,000) in compensation from the state — or about $65,000 (£50,000) for each year of the 17 years he spent in prison for a robbery he said he did not commit, starting when he was 25 years old and a father of two young daughters.

He is also seeking help with tuition, housing and counselling.

“It took a big chunk of my life that I can never get back,” Mr Jones said. “I am just trying to get stable in my everyday life. I am still transitioning.”

His daughters are now 24 and 19 and he is a grandfather, he added.

“At that time, I was pretty much trying to be responsible as a father,” he said. “I was not perfect, but I was a big part of their lives, and when I got incarcerated, it was hard for me because I was used to being around for my kids.”

“It was a hard pill to swallow,” Mr Jones said.

Richard Ainsworth, Mr Jones’ lawyer, said that they were hoping for a certificate of innocence and for compensation so he could “finally move forward with his life after spending over 17 years in prison for a crime he did not commit."

The petitions says: “This compensation is relatively small given the unfathomable hardship of 17 years of wrongful imprisonment."

The petition, reported by The Kansas City Star, is the latest twist in what has been described as the “doppelgänger case,” which is set out in court documents that trace the nearly two decades of Mr Jones’ ordeal of arrest, conviction, imprisonment and, finally, freedom.

Mr Jones’ case highlights the flaws in convictions based on eyewitness identification, which is the single greatest cause of wrongful convictions in the United States. Eyewitness identifications play a role in more than 75 per cent of convictions overturned through DNA testing, according to the Midwest Innocence Project, which helped him win release.

In Mr Jones’ case, there was no physical evidence placing him at the scene in the Roeland Park parking lot on May 31, 1999, according to the petition. That day, he was at his home in Kansas City, Missouri, cleaning up after a party with his girlfriend and her sisters, the petition said.

But in Roeland Park, across the state border, at 8pm the same day, a man tried to grab a woman’s handbag as she got out of her car. She resisted but he escaped with her phone, and she saw the back of his head, she told a detective.

Two other people saw the attack, but the three descriptions ranged from a light-skinned black man to a dark-skinned Hispanic to a tanned white man, the petition said.

The getaway car was traced to a man who said he and friends were in search of money for drugs and picked up a man they barely knew as “Rick.” He was shown hundreds of photographs in a database of men with similar names and features, according to the petition, and erroneously chose Mr Jones as the one he had driven to the parking lot robbery.

Mr Jones was arrested in April 2000, the petition said. In a line-up, his photograph was the only one among the six images to be that of a light-skinned man.

“Witnesses were presented with no other option but to choose Jones in the line-ups as created,” said Alice Craig, one of the lawyers and researchers at the University of Kansas School of Law’s Project for Innocence, which helped win his release.

“None of the other photos matched the description provided by the witnesses,” she said in a statement after he was released from prison in June 2017.

During a jury trial, the witnesses, seeing Mr Jones in person, said they were not sure whether he was the attacker, the petition said. But Mr Jones was convicted and sent to prison in 2000.

In prison, he was told about Ricky Amos when inmates started confusing the two. “I took it with a grain of salt,” Mr Jones said on Thursday.

But an idea started brewing that he thought could help him, once again, assert his innocence. “I knew it was, at that time, it was my only shot,” he said. “I could not lose. I had to throw it out there.”

Mr Jones sought the help of the Project for Innocence, and Amos’ photograph was tracked down, the project said.

“They looked like they could have been twins,” Chapman Williams, a former intern who had worked on the case at the Project for Innocence, said in 2017. “From there, other pieces of the puzzle began fitting together.”

Amos’ address was identified as the place where the getaway car had stopped to pick up “Rick,” the petition said. A spokesman for the Johnson County district attorney did not immediately return a call about Amos and the status of the robbery case.

Mr Jones filed a motion for post-conviction relief, the petition said, and Judge Kevin Moriarty held a hearing last year. Two of the witnesses recanted their identifications.

Mr Moriarty concluded that the court “has no doubt that a jury would not be able to reach a determination that this defendant was guilty, and this court does not believe any reasonable jury could have made such a decision in this case.”

On June 7, 2017, Mr Jones walked free.

“I just want my name to be clear,” he said.

The New York Times