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Ricky Jackson freed: American prisoner who was nearly executed found innocent after 39 years behind bars Ricky Jackson freed: American prisoner released after 39 years in behind bars as witness says he made it all up
(about 5 hours later)
A US prisoner who once faced execution has been cleared of doing anything wrong after spending 39 years of his life in prison. Ending a startling miscarriage of justice spanning nearly four decades, a judge in Cleveland, Ohio has exonerated a man convicted of aggravated murder after the only prosecution witness in his trial came forward and admitted he made up his testimony.
Ricky Jackson from Ohio spent almost four decades in captivity until a key witness at his trial admitted this year that he had lied as a boy. Ricky Jackson, who is now 59, is expected to be released on Friday after spending 39 years in prison for the killing in May 1975 of a money-order collector in Cleveland. He and two other men, who were brothers, were found guilty by a jury based on the testimony of a 12-year-old boy.
Mr Jackson, now 57, was only spared execution because the state of Ohio temporarily abolished the death penalty in the 1970s, while he was on death row. But at a hearing in Cleveland this week that witness, Eddy Vernon, who is now 51, stepped forward and confessed that, in fact, he never saw the attack and that the details of what happened had been fed to him by police. He was told that his parents would be arrested if he changed his story.
He was jailed alongside two other men over the 1975 murder of a Cleveland, Ohio man called Harold Franks. There was no other evidence linking the prisoner to the murder. “Everything was a lie. They were all lies,” Mr Vernon told Judge Richard McMonagle. He had been on a school bus at the time of the killing and other witnesses came forward to say he could not have seen the murder directly. The prosecution case had rested entirely on his words.
An undated photo of Ricky Jackson (AP) Mr Jackson is said to have cried in court as all charges were dropped against him. He is the longest-held US president to be completely exonerated, according to legal group the Ohio Innocence Project. “The scale of the miscarriage of justice in Ricky Jackson’s case is staggering,” Clive Stafford Smith, the head of Reprieve, a London-based charity that defends prisoners’ rights. He is currently involved in a similar hearing trying to exonerate British-born Kris Maharaj, who has been incarcerated in Florida for nearly 30 years for a double murder he says he didn’t commit.
"The state is conceding the obvious," Cuyahoga County Prosecutor Timothy McGinty said, as charges were dropped against Mr Jackson. “Much of what went wrong in Mr Jackson’s case is very familiar: a witness coached by the police into a version of events that would gain an easy conviction; a woeful lack of reliable evidence linking him to the crime; inept lawyering, especially for poor people; a jury or judge not willing to countenance doubt; and a ‘justice’ system where, once convicted, it becomes nearly impossible to overturn a sentence.”
He is expected to be freed on Friday 21 November. “I can’t believe this is over,” Mr Jackson declared, thanking lawyers from the Ohio Innocence Project that had pushed his case forward. “It’s over,” he was later heard yelling  into a phone  to his family.
The men jailed alongside Mr Jackson have also asked for a retrial, though their petitions have not yet received a response.
Authorities were said to be within 20 days of starting the execution of the men until Ohio ruled the death penalty unconstitutional.
Execution has since been reinstated as a punishment in the state, with those found guilty suffering a lethal injection.