Prisoner freed after serving 17 years as his lookalike is discovered
AN INMATE at a Kansas prison has been released after 17 years behind bars for a crime he did not commit, after researchers tracked down his lookalike.
Richard Anthony Jones was sent to prison for a robbery in 1999 in Roeland Park, Kansas.
There was no DNA evidence or fingerprints linking him to the crime scene, and at trial Mr Jones said that he was with his girlfriend and other family members in Kansas City on the day of the robbery. However, he was convicted on witness accounts, and sentenced to 19 years.
Mr Jones said that he began to despair that he would ever be released from jail, after repeated efforts to appeal against his sentence.
“All my appeals had been denied. It has been a rough ride,” he said.
In 2015 he spoke to researchers from the Midwest Innocence Project – a group that aids wrongly convicted prisoners – telling them that he had been told by fellow inmates that he looked identical to a man they knew called Ricky.
The researchers finally managed to track down Ricky, and discovered that he lived within 10 miles of the crime scene. “When I saw the picture of my double it all made sense to me,” Mr Jones said.
Mr Jones’s lawyers showed the two men’s photographs to the victim, two witnesses to the crime, and the prosecutor in the original case. None of them could tell the two apart.
A judge agreed and ordered that Mr Jones be released, with the prisoner finally walking free on Thursday.
His lawyers had argued in their motion that Mr Jones had suffered “manifest injustice”. “Mr Jones was convicted solely on eyewitness testimony that has been proven to be inherently flawed and unreliable,” they wrote.
Mr Jones said finding a photograph of the other man was a “needle in a haystack moment”. He told the Kansas City Star: “I don’t believe in luck, I believe I was blessed.”
No criminal case has been filed against his double, who gave evidence at Mr Jones’s hearing and denied committing the crime.
Mr Jones told the paper that he was now adjusting to life outside of jail and was happy to be back with his children.
“Everybody has a doppelgänger,” said Alice Craig, Mr Jones’ lawyer. “Luckily we found his.”