DA throws out murder case
Defense claimed detectives coached a key witness
In what is starting to become a recurring theme here, prosecutors have thrown out a 2013 murder case that hinged on the identification of an eyewitness whose interview was done by an Oakland police detective now facing perjury charges.
Leonard Jones, 41, was facing a murder charge in the April 2013 shooting death of Donitra Henderson. But last December, prosecutors threw out the case “in the interest of justice,” according to a minute order from the court hearing.
Jones' legal troubles are far from over. He's serving a 59-year prison term for convictions of attempted murder, carjacking and assault with a firearm — though he has a pending motion to reduce the sentence — and he faces two separate felony cases for allegedly possessing a knife and smuggling drugs while incarcerated at Santa Rita Jail in Dublin, records show.
Henderson was fatally shot April 24, 2013, as she sat in a parked car in the 600 block of 54th Street in North Oakland, while her then-4-year-old son was in the back seat. Jones was not charged until 2016, when a friend of Henderson who'd been present at the scene, Dominique Smith, identified Jones after police arrested Smith on a murder warrant in order to question her.
Smith never was charged in that case.
In 2021, Jones' attorney, Deputy Public Defender Christina Moore, authored a motion saying the circumstances surrounding Smith's identification of
Jones were suspicious. She said Detective Phong Tran and Sgt. Randy Brandwood failed to record themselves transporting her to an interview room, and that Smith seemed to know exactly what to say once the recorded interview began.
“The quickness in which Smith volunteers information as soon as she is inside the room with Tran and Brandwood is circumstantial evidence that Tran and Brandwood told her what they wanted to hear from her during the transport,” Moore wrote in court filings. “It will be argued that Tran and Brandwood fed her lines, so that once inside interview (sic), she immediately told them it was Jones who was responsible for Henderson's murder.”
Tran was charged with perjury and bribery last year for allegedly paying off a witness to get a murder conviction — which was dismissed after the allegations came to light — in an Oakland road rage shooting. Another murder case Tran handled was reduced manslaughter in a deal that sentenced the alleged shooter to serve a three-year jail term, after the defense accused Tran of fabricating a story that contradicted the suspect's self-defense claim. Brandwood, who since has retired from OPD, faces no such accusations.
Jones' two pending cases accuse him of befriending an Alameda County Sheriff's technician, Shannon Taylor, 51, of Antioch and persuading her to smuggle methamphetamine into the jail. In 2022, Taylor was sentenced to four days in jail and two years' probation, court records show.
Jones also is charged with possessing an 8.5inch piece of plastic that had been sharpened into a shank with a cardboard handle, according to police. The weapon was found in a cell Jones shared with another person, court records show.