Wrongfully Convicted Man Finally Receives Compensation—15 Years After His Release

More than a decade after his release for a wrongful conviction, Tyrone Jones has finally been officially declared innocent.

Although Tyrone Jones has been a free man for the last 15 years, a technicality kept him from receiving wrongful incarceration compensation. But that was remedied when, earlier this month, a judge officially declared Jones innocent of the 1998 murder of 16-year-old Tyree Wright in East Baltimore.

According to The Baltimore Banner, Jones, now 48, maintained his innocence from the very beginning. Initially, he told the police that he was playing pickup basketball at a nearby park before walking to a restaurant called CC’s at the time Wright was shot and killed.

After Jones was arrested and became the only suspect in the murder, prosecutors claimed Jones was guilty by proximity, that because he allegedly accompanied the actual shooter that he may as well have pulled the trigger himself.

Despite a lack of hard evidence connecting Jones to the murder of Wright, Circuit Judge John N. Prevas gave Jones a life sentence on the charge of conspiracy to commit first-degree murder. But Prevas said he was open to new evidence should it be presented because he found the case “extremely vexatious.”

Jones was still sent to prison for a crime he did not commit.

It was not until 2010 that the Baltimore State’s Attorney Office argued that Jones deserved a new trial because of evidence that had been concealed: a police report where the state’s star witness admitted that he did not actually see the shooting or who did it.

The Baltimore State’s Attorney Office dropped the case later that year, making Jones a free man. But because the crime Jones was originally charged with was still considered a misdemeanor and not a felony, he was ineligible for compensation under the Walter Lomas Act.

In 2024, the law was revised to include situations like Jones’. Instead of admitting that the office was wrong when it originally charged Jones for the crime, state prosecutors opposed his petition for reparations.

As Neel Lalchandani, one of Jones’ lawyers, told the Banner, “We had always left the door open for communication with the State’s Attorney’s Office to try to reach a resolution that would save everyone a lot of time and energy and, most importantly, save Mr. Jones from having to go through another legal proceeding. But we weren’t getting any traction.”

So she dug in her heels and forced the state to relitigate the case, during which point she and her team of lawyers exposed the flawed criminal justice process that resulted in her client’s initial conviction.

Due to findings that highlighted issues such as unreliable eyewitness testimony, questionable forensic evidence, and possible official misconduct in the original trial, the administrative judge declared Jones legally innocent and approved the compensation he had requested.

Michele Nethercott, formerly the director of the Innocence Project Clinic at the University of Baltimore School of Law, said that Jones’ case illustrates the resistance of the justice system to admitting and fixing their mistakes, even when they affect an innocent man’s life.