Doppelganger seeks $1.5m for jail
A case of mistaken identity that cost a man 17 years of his life may now cost the state of Kansas more than NZ$1.5 million.
In 1999 Richard Jones was convicted of attacking and robbing a woman in a car park in Kansas City and sentenced to 19 years in prison.
Jones, now 42, did not commit the crime – he was at a birthday party elsewhere in the city – but was picked out by eyewitnesses from a line of suspects.
After nearly two decades it emerged that the attacker was a man who looked uncannily like Jones and was also named Richard, but with the surname Amos.
Jones was freed in June last year after serving nearly all of the sentence in what has been described as the ‘‘doppelganger case’’. He has now petitioned the state of Kansas for US$1.1 million in compensation, or US$65,000 for each year he spent behind bars.
‘‘Mr Jones now asks this court to officially recognise his innocence, so that he may close this painful chapter of his life and obtain the clean slate and financial support that the legislature intended for wrongfully convicted persons,’’ his lawyers wrote in the court documents.
The petition also seeks an official declaration of innocence and support for college tuition, counselling and housing.
‘‘This compensation is relatively small given the unfathomable hardship of 17 years of wrongful imprisonment,’’ Jones’s lawyers said.
At the time of his arrest, he was 25 and had two young daughters. ‘‘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,’’ Jones told The New York Times. His children are now 24 and 19, and he has become a grandfather. Reformers have held up Jones’s case as an example of the flaws in the US justice system. ‘‘Richard’s case is a testament to the long, difficult and expensive process it takes to overturn a wrongful conviction,’’ said Tricia Bushnell, director of the Midwest Innocence Project, a charity that provides legal services to convicts with claims of innocence.
Misidentification by eyewitnesses is the greatest contributing factor to a worrying number of wrongful convictions in the US, according to the charity, yet legal precedents have meant that they are still relied on heavily in court proceedings.