Ohio Inmate Becomes the 119^th Innocent Person Freed from Death Row

On February 28, 2005, Ohio Common Pleas Judge Richard Niehaus dis­missed all charges against Derrick Jamison for the death of a Cincinnati bar­tender after pros­e­cu­tors elect­ed not to retry him in the case. (Associated Press, March 3, 2005). The pros­e­cu­tion had with­held crit­i­cal eye­wit­ness state­ments and oth­er evi­dence from the defense result­ing in the over­turn­ing of Jamison’s con­vic­tion in 2002. Jamison was con­vict­ed and sen­tenced to death in 1985 based in part on the tes­ti­mo­ny of Charles Howell, a co-defen­dant who had his own sen­tence reduced in exchange for his tes­ti­mo­ny against Jamison.

The pros­e­cu­tion with­held state­ments that con­tra­dict­ed Howell’s tes­ti­mo­ny and that would have under­mined the prosecution’s the­o­ry of how the vic­tim died, and would have point­ed to oth­er pos­si­ble sus­pects for the mur­der. Two fed­er­al courts ruled that the pros­e­cu­tion’s actions denied Jamison of a fair tri­al. (Jamison v. Collins, 291 F.3^d 380 (6^th Cir. 2002)).

One of the with­held stat­ments involved James Suggs, an eye­wit­ness to the rob­bery. Suggs tes­ti­fied at tri­al that he had been unable to make a pos­i­tive iden­ti­fi­ca­tion when the police showed him a pho­to array of sus­pects. In fact, police records show that Suggs iden­ti­fied two sus­pects, nei­ther of which was Derrick Jamison. Additional with­held evi­dence con­sist­ed of a series of dis­crep­an­cies between Jamison’s phys­i­cal char­ac­ter­is­tics and the descrip­tions of the per­pe­tra­tors giv­en to police inves­ti­ga­tors by eyewitnesses. 

The co-defen­dant Howell recent­ly tes­ti­fied that he could not remem­ber any­thing about the crime, and state pros­e­cu­tors decid­ed not to pro­ceed against Jamison. He remains incar­cer­at­ed on oth­er unre­lat­ed charges. (See also, K. Perry, ​“’85 Murder Conviction Dismissed,” Cincinnati Post, Mar. 1, 2005).

Jamison is the 119^th inno­cent per­son to be freed from death row since 1973 and the first to be exon­er­at­ed in 2005.

See DPIC’s lat­est Innocence Report. See also, Innocence.