Posted on 09/30/2003 11:50:34 AM PDT by bedolido
SEATTLE — A man who has served more than 12 years in prison after being convicted twice of stabbing his wife to death has won the right to a third trial.
A unanimous three-judge panel of the state Court of Appeals overturned the second conviction of Jerry Bartlett Jones on Monday, ruling that the trial judge wrongly barred the introduction of evidence about a neighbor that Jones says was the killer.
Snohomish County prosecutors have 30 days to decide whether to appeal to reinstate the conviction, proceed to a third trial or drop the matter. The case stems from the death of Lee Jones, 41, who was found in a pool of blood at the couple’s home in Bothell on Dec. 3, 1988. An autopsy showed she had been slashed and stabbed 63 times.
Her husband, a pharmaceutical sales representative, was convicted of first-degree murder in 1989 and sentenced to 25 years. Evidence against him included bloodstains on his clothing and a knife cut on one of his hands.
Jones, 57, has been behind bars since his arrest, except for about two years between the reversal of his first conviction and his second trial.
“I can think of 63 reasons for retrying him again,” deputy prosecutor Mark Roe said Monday. “It is just exceptionally frustrating to follow all the rules, give someone a fair trial and convict them, fair and square, and then have the rules change.”
The first conviction was overturned in 1998 by U.S. District Judge John C. Coughenour, who ruled that Jones’ trial lawyer failed to present evidence that Jones and his family have claimed would indicate a teenager who lived nearby at the time was the killer.
In the second trial, which also ended in conviction and a 25-year sentence, Superior Court Judge Gerald L. Knight barred the defense from presenting evidence about what had happened with the neighbor since the killing.
Now about 30, the man’s criminal record includes arrests and convictions for domestic violence and death threats toward women who rejected his advances.
“Without hearing this evidence and matters associated with it, the jury was left to speculate about what possible motive (the neighbor) would have had for murdering Lee Jones. Thus the evidence is relevant,” Judges Ronald E. Cox, Faye Kennedy and William W. Baker wrote.
Jones has maintained that his wife and their daughter, a teenager at the time, angered the neighbor by rejecting his advances.
“We were really hamstrung at the second trial,” said David Zuckerman, a lawyer who helped Jones win a second trial in 1999 and handled his defense in court in 2001. “We were permitted to show he had the opportunity to commit the crime, but we were not allowed to show the motive.”
Roe countered that the ruling seems to say “you can point your finger at anyone.”
“The fellow who is placed at issue here was a 15-year-old, not much over 100 pounds, at the time of Lee Jones’ murder,” Roe said. “There’s not a shred of evidence against him.”
It wasn't until a former nun came forward to testify that Campbell had raped her (and impregnated her) the morning of the triple murder after she supplied him with marijuana that the cloud of suspicion was lifted from the elderly neighbor's husband for this heinous crime.
What I'm trying to say is that Snohomish county prosecutors can be overzealous and wrong sometimes. Campbell was executed, eventually. I have often wondered how awful it must have been to be in the shoes of the elderly neighbor's husband and have the eyes of the law focused on you while you are grieving for your murdered wife.
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