Maleek Jones Conviction Overturned

A federal judge has ruled that Maleek Jones has been wrongfully imprisoned for over 28 years for a murder he’s always said he never committed.

Now, Jones is waiting on the state to decide whether he’ll face a new trial or can walk free for the first time in decades.

Jones was convicted in 1995 for the murder of Eddie Harp, who was shot and killed in his car outside Saint Raphael’s hospital in 1992. A judge sentenced Jones to 65 years in prison. Having been arrested for the murder at age 19, Jones is now a 50-year-old man.

Jones and others associated with his case have maintained that his conviction was the product of corruption in the New Haven Police Department (NHPD) — during an era in which New Haven police and prosecutors framed numerous Black men and sentenced them to decades of prison time.

In a rare reprieve from federal court, Judge Janet Hall ruled on Jones’ habeas corpus petition on Friday, citing an ​“ineffective” public defender and an ​“erroneous” exclusion of evidence by the judge in Jones’ initial trial three decades ago. 

“The State’s case against Mr. Jones was thin,” wrote Hall, whose decision came out on Friday a few weeks after a hearing on the matter at the end of July. ​“It hinged solely on the testimony of Mr. Spears, a self-interested witness whose account of the shooting … was nearly impossible to square with the ballistics evidence.”

Hall found that previous state court rulings on habeas petitions (alleging wrongful imprisonment) by Jones were so egregious that ​“no fair-minded jurist” would have decided the same way. 

After reviewing Judge Susan Cobb’s denial of Jones’ second habeas petition at the state level, Hall wrote, ​“Ultimately, this was not ​‘maybe’ a mistake, but a clear error of constitutional dimension.”

Jones will be allowed to leave prison by Oct. 10, unless the state decides to retry his case. The state can also appeal Hall’s ruling, meaning that Jones’ fight to clear his name is not necessarily over.

“The matter is under review by the Division of Criminal Justice,” said New Haven State’s Attorney John Doyle. ​“We’re considering all of our options.”

Jones first heard about the ruling from James Jeter, a friend and criminal justice reform advocate with the Full Citizens Coalition. 

“He was at a loss for words,” Jeter recalled. ​“It was completely surreal for him to know that something that he’d been fighting for for so long had come to this point. … It took him a while to let it sink in.”

Hall’s decision comes two months after another man wrongfully convicted in the 1990s, Adam Carmon, officially walked free from the criminal justice system with a clear name. It comes on the heels of activism from advocates seeking to clear their own names and others, including a protest and documentary screening this summer that drew attention to Jones’ case. Aside from Jones, 16 New Haveners have been exonerated from discredited convictions, after years of life spent in prison — making up half of all exonerations in the state.

“It’s a mounting tide of wrongful convictions,” said Alex Taubes, an attorney who knows Jones personally and who has represented New Haveners in similar situations. Jones’ lawyer, Anna-Liisa Nixon, was unable to comment in time for this story.

Jones could not be reached in time for the publication of this article. A documentary that Jeter and journalist Sarah Stillman released earlier this summer features an interview with him from before the decision. 

“Innocence doesn’t matter, to some degree. We see it now with so many people being exonerated, and especially exonerated in New Haven,” Jones told Jeter and Stillman. ​“So we know that there’s something wrong with the justice system. And for me, I just have a hope that they would get it right.”

Judge: Defense Should Have Investigated

Critical to Hall’s ruling was the fact that Jones’ public defender, Leo Ahern, did not hire an independent investigator to look into the case, despite having the funds to do so.

Ahern instead advised Jones’ family to pay out of pocket for an investigator named Jim Byrd, who eventually turned out to have falsified his credentials. The Jones family was unable to pay Byrd’s steep bills, and the investigator stopped working on the case, leaving no independent review of Jones’ case for Ahern to work with — even though public defenders had access to funding for private investigators.

Without an investigator, no one on Jones’ team ever interviewed Sheila McCray, the sole eyewitness to the shooting. McCray never spoke at Jones’ trial, though as Judge Hall ruled on Friday, her testimony might have changed the outcome of Jones’ conviction.

McCray, a friend of Harp’s, has alleged that New Haven police pressured her to identify Jones as the perpetrator. She didn’t yield to their pressure and instead identified someone else: Tyrone Spears.

Hall wrote in her decision, ​“Ms. McCray’s statements were strong evidence that the State’s version of what happened was wrong,” and that Jones was never involved in the crime.

Spears initially denied his own involvement in the shooting and did not mention Jones’ name in initial statements to police. But at Jones’ trial, he testified that he, Jones, and an associate named Pepper had all shot at Harp’s car in 1992; he would later receive a lighter charge of manslaughter in connection with the crime.

Eventually, two decades after Jones’ trial, Spears recanted his testimony against Jones. He confessed under oath that police had pressured him into falsely implicating Jones, and that Spears and Pepper had been the only shooters in the incident.

The second component of Hall’s ruling cited the trial court’s decision to exclude testimony from Lee Roy Bember, a man to whom Pepper confessed details of the crime without mentioning Jones’ involvement.

Hall’s decision did not focus on allegations that the NHPD pressured McCray and Spears to implicate Jones, nor did it touch on Jones’ claims that he was charged with Harp’s murder because Romano Ratti, an NHPD officer in the Narcotics Unit, sought to pressure him to deal drugs on Ratti’s behalf.

“His case is a really great example, unfortunately, of what’s wrong with the system and what’s wrong with the culture in the 1990s,” Jeter said of Jones’ situation. 

In a statement, City Corporation Counsel Patricia King wrote, ​“Every individual deserves equal and impartial justice under the law whether an incident occurred in 1992, as this one did, or in 2023. At this time, no formal legal allegations have been made that any New Haven police officer engaged in any improper conduct. If and when such legal claims are made, the City will participate in the litigation process in good faith and work towards an appropriate resolution so that justice is served. Beyond that, the City cannot comment further on the specifics of this case at this time, as we have not yet had the opportunity to fully review the judge’s ruling.” 

As Jones waits to hear whether the state will retry his case or appeal Hall’s ruling, he and others are waiting for the city and state to reckon with numerous instances of New Haven police and prosecutorial corruption targeting Black men in the 80s, 90s, and early 2000s.

There’s a need, Jeter said, ​“to get to the root of things.” He echoed calls for an overhaul to the Division of Criminal Justice’s Conviction Integrity Unit, an accountability mechanism that has not resulted in the overturning of any convictions since its inception in 2021.

“There’s still a ways to go,” said Taubes. ​“He’s still wrongfully, wrongfully, wrongfully, wrongfully incarcerated. As wrongfully as can be.”