For 45 years, 10 months and three days, Wilbert Jones languished behind bars for a crime he says he didn’t commit.
He was twice convicted of raping a nurse outside the Baton Rouge General Hospital in 1971 and was sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole.
But in 2017, Jones was released after evidence surfaced of striking similarities to rapes that another man committed around the same time. That man matched the description of the alleged rapist in Jones’ case and the man’s crimes against at least one other woman were eerily similar to the rape for which Jones was convicted.
Jones has yet to be fully exonerated, but he wants the state to grant him financial relief for the nearly 46 years he spent locked up for a crime he insists he didn’t do.
On Monday, the Louisiana Supreme Court heard arguments on Jones’ compensation claim during a hearing in the New Orleans courthouse.
“People like Wilbert Jones, who served 46 years of wrongful imprisonment — he went to jail when he was 19 and came out a week shy of his 64th birthday,” said Zachary Crawford, Jones’ attorney from the Innocence Project of New Orleans. “The Legislature intended to compensate these folks and help them to rebuild their lives. Not to be in litigation for 3½ years.”
Jones in October 2018 petitioned the court for $330,000 in compensation, arguing he was wrongfully found guilty in 1974.
One month after the 1st Circuit Court of Appeal overturned a judge’s decision denying Jones’ compensation claim in August, Louisiana Attorney General Jeff Landry appealed to the Louisiana Supreme Court.
State attorneys argued that the appeals court erred in the standard of review applied in its ruling because the 19th Judicial District Court’s previous judgement was not “plainly wrong or manifestly erroneous,” the state’s litmus test for wrongful conviction compensation.
During Monday’s hearing, Christopher Walters, of the state Attorney General’s office, told justices Jones failed to meet the burden of proof for compensation.
Leave a Reply