Barry Jones Freed from Arizona’s Death Row after 29 Years

On June 15, 2023, Arizona death-sen­tenced pris­on­er Barry Jones was freed after serv­ing 29 years for a crime that the Arizona Attorney General agreed he did not com­mit. Mr. Jones was sen­tenced to death in 1995 after being con­vict­ed of mur­der­ing his girlfriend’s four-year-old daugh­ter in 1994. Medical evi­dence that was read­i­ly avail­able at the time of tri­al showed that the child did not sus­tain her fatal inter­nal injuries dur­ing the time while she was in Mr. Jones’s care. But this evi­dence was not dis­cov­ered by either his tri­al attor­ney or his state post-con­vic­tion attor­ney. In 2018, Mr. Jones pre­sent­ed this evi­dence for the first time in fed­er­al court as proof that his state coun­sel had been inef­fec­tive for fail­ing to inves­ti­gate and present med­ical evi­dence that con­tra­dict­ed the prosecution’s time­line. Both the fed­er­al dis­trict court and the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals agreed he was enti­tled to a new trial. 

But in 2022, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled against him in Shinn v. Ramirez, pro­hibit­ing him from intro­duc­ing any evi­dence in fed­er­al court that was not already on the state record. That meant that Mr. Jones could not argue for the first time in fed­er­al court that he had received inef­fec­tive assis­tance from his state-lev­el lawyers — and could not there­fore present the com­pelling med­ical evi­dence his state lawyers should have dis­cov­ered. At the time the rul­ing was hand­ed down, Christina Swarns, the exec­u­tive direc­tor of the Innocence Project, said ​“The opin­ion leaves inno­cent peo­ple in the night­mar­ish posi­tion of hav­ing no court to go to for justice.” 

Under the fed­er­al Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act (AEDPA) defen­dants are gen­er­al­ly pro­hib­it­ed from rais­ing claims in fed­er­al habeas court that they did not raise dur­ing their ini­tial tri­al or their state-lev­el appeal. However, in Martinez v. Ryan in 2012 and Trevino v. Thaler in 2013, the Supreme Court held that there was a nar­row excep­tion to that rule. If the defen­dant could prove that they received inef­fec­tive assis­tance of coun­sel both at tri­al and dur­ing state-lev­el appeals, and there­fore they nev­er had com­pe­tent coun­sel to raise tri­al-lev­el claims, then they could raise those claims for the first time dur­ing fed­er­al habeas review. Shinn (which was a con­sol­i­dat­ed case involv­ing both Mr. Jones and anoth­er Arizona death row defen­dant, David Martinez Ramirez) was con­sid­ered by some legal experts to con­tra­dict that prece­dent, because the Court held that while defen­dants could raise the claim, they could only use the evi­dence that had been devel­oped on the record dur­ing the tri­al and state appeals. 

While Shinn is still the law of the land, and crim­i­nal defen­dants for both cap­i­tal and non-cap­i­tal crimes now have a much more lim­it­ed path for fed­er­al judi­cial review, the deci­sion did not bar the Arizona Attorney General’s Office from inde­pen­dent­ly review­ing the case. After doing so, the office agreed to a set­tle­ment agree­ment that had Mr. Jones plead­ing guilty to sec­ond-degree mur­der — for fail­ing to take his girlfriend’s daugh­ter to a hos­pi­tal while she was in his care and already suf­fer­ing from her fatal inter­nal injury — in exchange for which he was released from prison for time served.