ALMOST FOUR YEARS after a federal judge overturned Barry Jones’s 1995 conviction, the U.S. Supreme Court invalidated the order directing Arizona to release or retry Jones and reinstated his death sentence. The ruling puts Jones on a path to execution in a state that just restarted its death machinery — despite significant evidence that he is innocent.
The 6-3 decision in Shinn v. Martinez Ramirez was authored by Justice Clarence Thomas, who wrote that Barry Jones and David Martinez Ramirez, another man on Arizona’s death row, should not have been allowed to present new evidence in federal court showing that they had received ineffective assistance of counsel at trial. In Jones’s case, the evidence dismantled the state’s original theory of the crime, prompting U.S. District Judge Timothy Burgess to vacate his conviction. If not for the failures of Barry Jones’s trial attorneys, Burgess wrote in 2018, jurors likely “would not have convicted him of any of the crimes with which he was charged and previously convicted.”
Innocence is not enough Strict Scrutiny podcast EP50 May 30, 2022
Lilian Segura of The Intercept joins law prof hostesses Kate Shaw, Melissa Murray and Leah Litman to discuss the Supreme Court's shocking decision in which Clarence Thomas notoriously suggests that for a federal court to take evidence [as it did] regarding the possible innocence of a death row inmate would be an "affront" to the sovereign state of Arizona.
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