Color Of Wrongful Conviction
Julius Jones remembers the night of July 28, 1999 pretty clearly. He had just turned nineteen three days earlier. That night, he ate a homemade spaghetti dinner with his family after playing board games with his siblings.
Less than twenty miles away from the Jones’ residence in Oklahoma City, a Black man wearing a stocking cap and a red bandana shot 45-year old insurance executive Paul Howell while trying to steal his 1997 GMC Suburban. Julius Jones was unaware that this botched carjacking would change the course of his life or that he would eventually be wrongfully convicted for the murder of Paul Howell. However, the circumstances that led to Jones’ wrongful conviction are not as unusual as popular true crime titles like Making a Murder and Serial would lead people to believe – especially not for Black Americans like Jones.
Wrongful conviction, as Georgetown University Law Professor Marc Howard notes, “is not a unique situation.” The Innocence Project estimates that between 2-5% of incarcerated persons are actually innocent. A variety of factors can put a person behind bars despite their innocence. Suspects might falsely confess to crimes they didn’t commit, especially if the suspect is young or intellectually disabled. Prosecutors can persuade innocent people into confessing to crimes they didn’t commit with the pressure of an unbelievably harsh sentence and the tempting offer of a plea deal.
In Jones’ case, police told a codefendant, Christopher Jones, that he could escape the death penalty if he testified against Jones. Ladell King, a man who had stolen cars in the Oklahoma City metro area for years, told police that Christopher Jordan and Julius Jones were coconspirators in the murder of Paul Howell. Jordan’s testimony would be the first contributing factor in Jones’ wrongful conviction for the murder of Paul Howell.
Almost twenty-one years after the crime, Julius Jones insists that he had nothing to do with the murder of Paul Howell. Significant evidence supports his case. Howell’s sister, the only witness to the crime, described the shooter as a black man with approximately half an inch of hair hanging out of his stocking cap. At the time of the crime, Jones’ hair was “almost shaved to his skin.” Other evidence suggests that Jones’ codefendant, Christopher Jordan, framed him to cover up his own crime. Sources acknowledge that Jordan, who had his hear in cornrows at the time, would have had long enough hair to fit the profile of the man with the gun. Further, Chris Jordan spent the night at the Jones’ house the day before Julius Jones was taken into custody. The gun that linked Jones to the crime was found in the room where Jordan had stayed the night.
Evidence from Julius Jones’ case is in line with national data which indicates that wrongful conviction is an incredibly racialized phenomenon. A 2016 study from the National Registry of Exonerations found that African Americans accounted for 47% of wrongful convictions based on approximately 1,900 exonerations from 1989-2016. Further, African Americans made up the majority of wrongful convictions in the three largest categories of crime leading to exonerations: murder, sexual assault, and drug crimes. Several factors contribute to disproportionate wrongful convictions in a criminal justice system that targets Black Americans. Research from the National Registry of Exonerations notes that the cause of wrongful conviction among African Americans depends on the crime. In cross-racial crimes, most specifically in sexual assault, eyewitness misidentification can lead to wrongful conviction. In the sexual assault cases surveyed by the National Registry of Exonerations, most African American exonerees were misidentified by white victims. Additionally, racial profiling and other discriminatory practices, leads law enforcement to stop and search Blacks more frequently than whites, contributing to wrongful conviction in drug crimes. Lastly, official conduct is a large contributor to wrongful convictions against African Americans. Among white murder exonerees, official misconduct occurred in fewer than two-thirds of cases, in sharp contrast to cases concerning Black murder exonerees, where official misconduct played a role in more than three-quarters of cases with Black defendants.
Racist official misconduct was a large factor in Jones’ case. He found himself on the receiving end of racial slurs from the moment he was arrested for the murder of Paul Howell. While being transferred from one police car to another, an officer removed his handcuffs and said, “Run, n*****, I dare you.” froze, knowing that he would be shot and killed if her moved. During Jones’ trial, his attorney reported that a juror had said that the case was a waste of time, commenting that “they should just take the n***** out and shoot him behind the jail.” Prosecutors also contributed to a racialized narrative of Jones’ alleged crime, “appealing to the deeply entrenched and stereotypical association between blackness and dangerousness,” according to Jones’ clemency report.
Wrongful conviction cases like Julius Jones’ are just one effect of a justice system crafted to work against African Americans, and a consequence that must be addressed as part of the larger conversation about racial justice in the United States. Black exonerees evidence a legal system that is both steeped in racial inequality and unable to correctly identify those responsible for major crimes. We cannot consider a system bearing both attributes to be capable of serving justice in America.
You can sign a petition demanding justice for Julius Jones here.
