by Chuck Sharman
After 29 years in prison, condemned Arizona prisoner Barry Lee Jones was freed on June 15, 2023. Callous state prison officials dropped him on a street in Phoenix. Undeterred, Jones walked in the heat to the only address he recalled: the office of Arizona Public Defenders (AFD).
Jones, 64, was convicted in 1995 of abusing and killing his ex-girlfriend’s daughter, Rachel Gray, 4. Her mother, Angela Gray, served 11 years in prison for reckless child abuse because she failed to get her child life-saving medical treatment.
Years later, now-retired AFD investigator Andrew Sowards discovered discrepancies in the testimony the medical examiner gave at the two trials. He also found unexamined tissue samples from the child’s corpse that showed scarring, indicating her injuries were sustained before the day Jones allegedly abused her.
AFD attorneys filed a habeas corpus petition for Jones, claiming ineffective assistance of counsel (IAC) at his trial. The federal court for the District of Arizona agreed and tossed his conviction in 2018, a decision affirmed the following year by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit. But in May 2022, the U.S. Supreme Court reversed that decision, saying federal courts cannot hear an ...
by Chuck Sharman
On June 8, 2023, a judge in Alabama’s Lauderdale County handed a life sentence without parole to a state prisoner for escaping the county lockup with his jail-guard lover, who then committed suicide as pursuing police closed in. Casey White, 39, pleaded guilty to felony escape in a deal with prosecutors, who dropped a capital murder charge that might have sent him to death row.
White was serving a 75-year prison sentence for attempted murder with the state Department of Corrections (DOC) when he was transferred to the Lauderdale County Detention Center in 2020 to face trial for a 2015 murder in the county. Not quite two years later, jail Assistant Director Vicky White, 56 – who was no relation – hurriedly arranged her own retirement and sold her home at a steep discount for cash to finance the prisoner’s escape on April 29, 2022. Their getaway triggered a nearly two-week manhunt before cops caught up with the couple near Evansville, Indiana, running their car off the road on May 9, 2022. Vicky White then fatally shot herself. [See: PLN, Nov. 2022, p.58.]
“You think you know someone,” county Sheriff Rick Singleton said of his dead ...
by Chuck Sharman
A group of women who claimed they were raped by a physician’s assistant at New York City’s Rikers Island jail complex has now been screwed two more times. First, prosecutors apparently bungled the criminal case against their alleged assailant. Then a lawsuit the group filed was stayed by the federal court for the Southern District of New York on March 8, 2023, pending the outcome of bankruptcy proceedings filed by one of the defendants, former jail healthcare provider Corizon Health.
The group of 29 former detainees alleged that the City and Corizon Health should have stopped Sidney Wilson from abusing his role in the jail’s medical unit to ply them with gifts – including Popeye’s Chicken, a sex toy and prescription drugs – as he “repeatedly raped, sexually assaulted and abused” them between 2015 and 2017. [See: PLN, Nov. 2016, p.63.]
Wilson, now 66, was criminally charged. But the charges were dropped in June 2021. Bronx Senior Assistant District Attorney Nancy Strohmeyer admitted then that the case “could not be brought into compliance” with reform laws passed the year before, which set strict timelines for prosecutors to share discovery materials with defendants.
Though their alleged assailant ...
by Chuck Sharman
Depending on who’s telling the story, Missouri prisoner Michael Tisius, 42, got either what he deserved or the last in a long line of bad breaks when he was executed on June 6, 2023, hours after the Supreme Court of the U.S. (SCOTUS) refused to hear his last appeal.
Tisius was 18 in 1999 when he tried to pawn a rented stereo and was locked up on a misdemeanor charge in the Randolph County Jail. There he met Roy Vance, then 27, who later recalled the teen was “a kid in a grown man’s body, and I knew I could manipulate him into what I wanted him to do.”
Following a plan they hatched, Tisius returned to the jail after his release with Vance’s then-27-year-old girlfriend, Traci Burlington, on June 22, 2000, under the guise of delivering cigarettes to the prisoner. The plan was to overpower guards to steal their cell keys. But instead Tisius shot and killed jail supervisor Leon Egley, 33, and guard Jason Acton, 36. However,
their keys didn’t open Vance’s cell.
Leaving him there, Tisius and Burlington fled and were captured the next day, after their car broke down 130 miles away in ...
by Chuck Sharman
After Georgia prisoner Nathan Weekes and three others were indicted for murder in April 2022, a smuggling ring they operated at Smith State Prison was busted. That has now led to the arrest of the prison’s warden, Brian Dennis Adams, 48, on February 8, 2023.
The state ...
by Chuck Sharman
Three years after Gov. Gavin Newsom (D) unveiled a plan to pardon LGBTQ Californians prosecuted for their sexual orientation, the program has exactly one living beneficiary: Henry Pachnowski, 83, whose 1967 lewd conduct conviction was pardoned in 2022.
“While this initiative may appear to rectify historical wrongs, ...
by Kevin W. Bliss, Chuck Sharman and Benjamin Tschirhart
On May 31, 2023, Luis Molina, Commissioner of the New York City Department of Correction (DOC), announced his agency would no longer make public reports of in-custody deaths. Why? Molina blamed the federal monitor overseeing a long-running class-action lawsuit to improve ...
by Chuck Sharman
After a wild legal ride, Norberto Peets was exonerated of attempted murder on May 9, 2023, and he was released from a New York prison after 26 years.
Early on September 29, 1996, two New York City policemen patrolling in Fordham Heights heard gunfire. They traced the ...
by Chuck Sharman
A study released on March 14, 2023, revealed that New York’s controversial new bail laws have not led to more rearrests of offenders, as some politicians claimed. In fact, according to the study’s authors at the John Jay College Data Collaborative for Justice (DCJ), the opposite is ...
by Chuck Sharman
On March 16, 2023, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) voted to begin rule-making to implement the Martha Wright-Reed Just and Reasonable Communications Act of 2022. Named after a determined woman who tirelessly campaigned to lower her bill to call her imprisoned grandson – which sometimes exceeded $1 ...
