An Arizona man who spent nearly 30 years on death row for the 1994 killing of a sexually abused 4-year-old girl was released Thursday after a medical reexamination failed to prove Barry Lee Jones was responsible for the child’s fate.
Jones was sentenced to death in 1995 following the sexual assault and brutal murder of his girlfriend’s daughter more than a year earlier. Jones had driven the child and her mother to a Tucson hospital, where the girl was pronounced dead due to a “blunt abdominal trauma” caused by a bowel laceration. Authorities blamed Jones for the injury.
A federal judge called for Jones’ release in 2018 after ruling that his previous lawyer didn’t sufficiently investigate whether the girl’s injuries were caused during a time period where she was alone with the suspect. That ruling was revisited by an appellate court and reversed by the U.S. Supreme Court before prosecutors and defense attorneys hammered out a deal to secure his release this week.
Jones pleaded guilty to a lesser second-degree murder charge, which called for him to take responsibility for the death of a child by failing to seek appropriate medical care. He was then sentenced to 25 years, with the court ruling that the 29 total years he spent behind bars constituted time served.
“Mr. Jones spent nearly three decades on Arizona’s death row despite compelling evidence that he was innocent of charges that he had fatally assaulted [the girl],” his attorney said after his release.
Experts testified the girl may have been injured prior to the time that Jones was suspected of harming her.
There are still 110 convicts on Arizona’s death row. The state resumed executions in May 2022 following an unnerving 2014 lethal injection that went awry when the poisons failed to act effectively, according to AZCentral.com. Nearly two dozen of the inmates waiting to be executed in the Grand Canyon State have reportedly run out of appeals.