Death row inmate released after 29 years for death of 4-year-old
A man who spent 29 years on Arizona’s death row for the murder of a child has been released after his sentence was thrown out.
Barry Lee Jones was convicted for the murder, child abuse, and sexual assault in 1995, but has always insisted on his innocence.
He was sentenced to death, but was finally released after his legal team struck a deal with prosecutors – allowing him to plead guilty to a lesser charge and get out with time served.
‘After almost 30 years on death row for a crime he did not commit, Barry Jones is finally coming home,’ federal public defender Cary Sandman said.
In 1994, Jones brought Rachel Gray, his girlfriend’s four-year-old daughter, to a hospital in Tucson. She was declared dead on arrival from bowel laceration, which doctors determined was from ‘blunt abdominal trauma.’
Gray was in Jones’s care the entire day before her death, which lead police to believe that he beat and sexually abused her, causing her injuries.
But Jones has insisted on his innocence for decades. After reexamining his case, legal experts came to the conclusion that his court-appointed lawyer failed to adequately investigate how Gray was injured the night before.
A second investigation years later revealed that Gray was most likely injured the day before when a neighborhood boy hit her in the stomach with a metal bar.
‘The flawed evidence supporting Barry’s convictions and death sentence resulted from a combination of shoddy and constitutionally deficient defense lawyering, junk science and myopic police work,’ Sandman said.
A federal judge vacated Jones’s conviction in 2018, but he remained in prison while prosecutors appealed to the Supreme Court. In 2022, the high court reversed the appeals court decision, and Jones was placed back on death row.
But the Supreme Court ruling did allow for state courts in Arizona to reconsider the evidence against Jones.
Jones’s legal team struck a deal with prosecutors – he would plead guilty to the charge of second-degree murder for not taking Gray to the hospital earlier after seeing her injuries, and the state would drop all other charges.
Jones was sentenced to 25 years in prison, and given credit for the entire sentence for the 29 years he already spent behind bars.
‘These are some of the most difficult decisions we face as prosecutors, trying to balance the rule of the law and in this case holding someone accountable for the death of an innocent 4-year-old child,’ Pima County District Attorney Laura Conover said.
‘To this end, Mr Jones has been held more than accountable.’
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