The Robert Jones BBC News website

PART 3

 

Robert Jones was jailed after Middleton holidaymaker Julie Stott was shot during a botched robbery in New Orleans in 1992

Robert Jones was jailed after Middleton holidaymaker Julie Stott was shot during a botched robbery in New Orleans in 1992. 
BBC website: Robert Jones wrongfully convicted

 

Baffling: impossible for someone to understand or explain:

I found what he was saying completely baffling.
The baffling array of features on baby monitors can be overwhelming.

Cambridge Dictionary

Baffling

impossible to understand; perplexing; bewildering; puzzling

The financial markets can be baffling.
The book features a detective who can penetrate the most baffling mysteries.
Crash investigators are focusing on the baffling loss of the aircraft’s tail.

1 Robert Jones reflects on spending 23 years in prison for a crime he says he didn’t commit
NOLA.com

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28 October 2015 Last updated at 17:33 GMT

  • A man has been in prison in the US for 23 years for shooting dead a British tourist even though the judge in his trial and police detectives believe he is innocent of the crime.
  • Robert Jones was accused of being behind a crime spree of rape, robbery and then the murder of holidaymaker Julie Stott in New Orleans in 1992.
  • Despite another man being convicted for the murder and being overwhelmingly linked to all the other crimes, Mr Jones was never released.
  • In June, the Louisiana Supreme Court acknowledged that Mr Jones did not get a fair trial and ruled that his case should be reopened. But he remains behind bars.

Our North America Correspondent, Aleem Maqbool has this exclusive report.
Produced by Ashley Semler; filmed and edited by Peter Murtaugh

BBC website:

Robert Jones wrongfully convicted

2 Robert Jones: one of the worst racially inspired miscarriages of justice ever 

1 The judge in the case
Judge Calvin Johnson

Judge Calvin Johnson

Transcript: the talk in the BBC website above:
  • I meet Judge Calvin Johnson in the spacious hallways of New Orleans’s grand criminal court.
  • It’s a place he came to love over his long career, but one where he now says grave injustices were done.
  • “The fact that Robert Jones was wrongly convicted and is in jail for something he arguably he didn’t do weighs heavily on me,” says the judge, now retired, who presided over Robert’s trial in 1996.
  • “But we had a prosecutor’s office that was not forthcoming in providing information that could help defendants. It was playing fast and loose with the truth and was negligent across several cases and they did it consistently. That is what happened with Robert Jones.”
  • Himself an African-American, Johnson makes the astonishing claim that the system worked to put as many young, black men behind bars for as long as possible.
  • “That wasn’t anything unique about Robert Jones or that time. I mean that was the driving force in this town for decades,” he says.
  • The way we looked at Robert Jones was: ‘If he didn’t do this, he did something else and therefore his punishment is not justified for this particular act, it’s justified for other things he did and got away with.’”
  • Both of the prosecutors involved in Robert’s case declined to be interviewed.
  • The first is Roger Jordan, now a defence lawyer. In 2005, in a rare ruling, the Louisiana Supreme Court barred him from practising law for three months for withholding evidence in another case.
  • He said “professional rules of ethics” prevented him from discussing Robert Jones’s case with me.
  • The second is Fred Menner, who argued the case against Robert Jones in court and is still a prosecutor. Again, he said he could not speak to me on the record about an active case.
  • But in September of this year, a memo that Menner wrote in 1996 was finally made public. In essence, it concedes that there was no admissible evidence against Robert Jones in the Julie Stott murder case.
 
District Attorney Leon Cannizzaro

District Attorney Leon Cannizzaro

 

Some might argue that the massive volume of cases going through the criminal justice system in Louisiana is bound to result in mistakes.

Others have suggested that prosecutors may have withheld evidence to speed up trials, or simply to win.

It is hard to prove Judge Johnson’s allegation that there was a conspiracy to lock up as many black youths as possible, but another senior figure in the Louisiana justice system accepts that something was badly wrong during the 30 years the state prosecutor’s office was run by District Attorney Harry Connick (father of the jazz musician and singer, Harry Connick Jr).

“Certainly the reputation of this office traditionally has been stained, there is no question about that,” says the man doing the job now, District Attorney Leon Cannizzaro.

There is also no question that this is not the only case, there have been other cases, where prosecutors either intentionally or negligently withheld evidence. The best I can do is move forward.”

“From this point, from the moment I took office, what we said we were going to do, is those things are not going to happen.”

But despite this admission, in the past Cannizzaro has strenuously fought accusations that the prosecutor’s office exhibited a pattern of failures.

On that basis, he refused $14m in compensation to a man named John Thompson, who was freed from death row after evidence withheld by prosecutors was finally brought to light.

He also fought to prevent any court ruling that Robert Jones’s trial was unfair, but in June the Louisiana Supreme Court finally dismissed his appeals.

He then wanted a bond of $2.25 million to be paid if Jones was to be released ahead of a retrial.

But in mid-November that demand was rejected by a judge, who said that pending a retrial – on the charge of rape – Robert could finally leave jail.

2 The lawyer was a real disaster

Transcript: the talk in the BBC website above:

Another person I wanted to talk to was Robert Jones’s original defence attorney, Curklin Atkins, and as he never returned my calls I decided to visit his home.

 Robert Jones's original defence attorney, Curklin Atkins

After several minutes knocking on his front door, I noticed a movement in the car parked in the driveway.
It appeared to be a head slowly being raised which disappeared again suddenly when I turned.
It was Atkins, so I walked over to talk to him through the car window.
“People can say whatever they want to say, they wasn’t in the heat of the battle,” he said, referring to people who have criticised his handling of the case.
The idea that it was his incompetence that led to Robert Jones spending 23 years in jail for crimes he did not commit, he dismissed as “impossible”.
“While people on the side are sitting back criticising and saying, ‘You could have did this, you could have did that, you could have investigated this, investigated that,’ they didn’t spend the time – they could have went down there and represented Robert Jones.”
Any other defence attorney might also have failed to find out that Lester Jones had already been convicted of Julie Stott’s murder, he said.

 

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3 Man ‘wrongly’ jailed for decades for killing UK tourist

 

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Gepubliceerd op 19 feb. 2017
 

Gepubliceerd op 28 okt. 2015

BBC News

A man has been in prison in the US for 23 years for shooting dead a British tourist even though the judge in his trial and police detectives believe he is innocent of the crime. Robert Jones was accused of being behind a crime spree of rape, robbery and then the murder of holidaymaker Julie Stott in New Orleans in 1992. Despite another man being convicted for the murder and being overwhelmingly linked to all the other crimes, Mr Jones was never released. In June, the Louisiana Supreme Court acknowledged that Mr Jones did not get a fair trial and ruled that his case should be reopened. But he remains behind bars. Our North America Correspondent, Aleem Maqbool has this exclusive report.

4 Robert Jones wrongly-jailed for murder speaks out after release – BBC News

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BBC Podcast

 BBC World Service Documentaries-20151210-Robert Jones Free At Last 26 minutes

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3 The Baffling menu has about 30 web pages

Baffle

to cause someone to be completely unable to understand or explain something:

She was completely baffled by his strange behaviour.

Cambridge Dictionary

5 Wrongful Conviction Podcast SE01 Trailer

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Gepubliceerd op 3 mrt. 2017

 
Wrongful Conviction with Jason Flom is a podcast about tragedy, triumph, unequal justice and actual innocence. Based on the files of the lawyers who freed them, Wrongful Conviction features interviews with men and women who have spent decades in prison for crimes they did not commit – some of them had even been sentenced to death. These are their stories.

6 Un trou dans l’aquarium!!! –  Leaking Aquarium Prank

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L’homme qui se prend pour un drôle d’Indiana Jones demande aux passants de mettre leur doigt sur l’aquarium parce qu’il y a un trou dedans. Mais quand le gardien de sécurité arrive avec la pancarte NE PAS TOUCHER et que les gens retirent leur doigt, l’aquarium s’est mystérieusement rebouché.
 
Une présentation de la chaine vidéo YouTube officielle de Juste pour rire les gags. Bourrez-vous la face des meilleurs et plus drôls gags de caméra cachée jamais tournés.
 
Weird Indiana Jones impersonator asks people to use their finger to stop a leak in an aquarium. When a mall cop shows up and asks them to remove their finger, they discover there was no actual leak and it was all just a trick.
 
A presentation of JustForLaughsTV, the official Just For Laughs Gags YouTube channel. Home of the funniest, greatest, most amazing, most hilarious, win filled, comedy galore, hidden camera pranks in the world!