Maleek Jones was on his way to work Tuesday morning when his lawyer called with the news: The state’s latest effort to send him back to prison had failed.
The 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals had decided to uphold his exoneration.
“A stream of emotions just came across me,” said Jones. “I shared the news with my family. They was all emotional. I had to really sit down for a minute and really process all that was going on.”
Three years after a U.S. District Court judge overturned his 30-year conviction for the 1992 murder of Eddie Harp, Jones is now one step closer to fully disentangling from the criminal legal system.
He has been living in North Carolina since his release, still under federal supervision, working as a quality assurance specialist and paraprofessional at a mental health services organization. If he wants to leave the state, he has to ask the probation office for permission. Up until May, he was not allowed to re-enter the state of Connecticut.
All the while, the threat that the appeals court could overturn Hall’s decision has loomed over Jones. “It was hard. It caused me a lot of anxiety,” said Jones. He always wondered “whether I would be put back in prison.”
That concern has not entirely disappeared, although the chance is now low that Jones will be re-imprisoned for Harp’s murder. According to Jones’s lawyer, Alex Taubes, the state could decide to appeal the appeals court’s decision further to the U.S. Supreme Court. Or, the state’s attorney could choose to re-try Jones for the 1994 murder.
The state’s attorney’s office did not respond to a request for comment in time for the publication of this story.
Jones was convicted in 1995 of the murder of Harp, who was shot and killed in his car outside Saint Raphael’s Hospital in October 1992. Jones was 19 at the time, and he professed his innocence throughout the nearly 31 subsequent years he spent in prison.
In the summer of 2023, U.S. District Court Judge Janet Hall overturned Jones’s conviction on two grounds: that the public defender representing Jones failed to adequately defend him, and that the trial court erred in a decision to exclude the testimony of someone to whom another shooter confessed.
The state appealed, arguing that Hall had not met the appropriate legal standard of finding that a lower court’s decision was “beyond any possibility for fairminded disagreement.”
On Tuesday, two of the three federal appeals court judges, Barrington Parker and Eunice Lee, affirmed Hall’s decision. They wrote that “admittedly, the burden of proof required to obtain relief… is a difficult one… However, if that high standard is met in any case, it is met here. Jones’s trial attorney straight-forwardly failed to provide effective representation, and Jones was prejudiced as a result.”
A third judge, Richard Sullivan, dissented. He argued that that the district court should have shown more deference to lower courts — and more benefit of the doubt to Jones’s former attorney. “We must presume competence and ‘affirmatively entertain the range of possible reasons [the defendant]’s counsel may have had for proceeding as [he] did’ — even if the attorney himself ‘could not conjure up’ any reason for his decisions,” Sullivan wrote, citing the case Cullen v. Pinholster .
The state’s original case against Jones rested on the testimony of one witness, Tyrone Spears — a man who himself admitted to perpetrating the shooting, and whose charges were downgraded to manslaughter after his testimony.
Spears initially testified that he, Jones, and a third man all shot at Harp that evening. He would eventually recant his testimony multiple times in court, citing pressure to alleviate the case against him. Ballistic evidence, meanwhile, supported the theory that only two people fired shots that night.
The only other witness to the shooting that night — Sheila McCray, a security guard on duty at Saint Raphael’s Hospital at the time — maintained that she only saw two men, one of whom she identified as Spears. McCray said that police officers wanted her to implicate Jones along with the other two men.
“They were at my job constantly, just harassing me. They wanted me to say that Maleek Jones was the shooter. And I refused,” McCray said in the 2023 advocacy documentary Free Maleek , echoing her testimony at Jones’s 2015 habeas trial. “Because I didn’t know Maleek, but when they started to lay pictures out, they wanted me to say that it was him. And I said no, that’s not who I saw.”
McCray never had a chance to tell this to the jury that convicted Jones. In fact, she was never contacted by Jones’s lawyer, public defender Leo Ahern.
In August 2023, Judge Hall found that Ahern was derelict for not hiring an investigator to look into the case, despite having the resources to do so. When Jones’s family tried to enlist a private investigator of their own, they were scammed.
Just over a month after Hall’s decision that August, Jones was released from prison. He hugged his mom, tasted a slice of Modern pizza , and swiftly moved down to North Carolina — where he agreed to reside while under federal supervision as the state appealed Hall’s decision.
Lawyer Taubes, who pointed out that the dissenting judge on the appeals court was appointed by President Donald Trump, said that if the state decides not to appeal and to dismiss the charges, “Maleek Jones could finally have a taste of what real freedom would look like.”
Jones awaits the state’s next steps at a time when the city has become more acutely aware than ever of the potential dire financial consequences of a network of wrongful convictions tracing back to witness coercion and other misconduct rampant in the New Haven Police Department during the 1980s, 1990s, and 2000s.
The city recently settled three wrongful conviction lawsuits by Adam Carmon , Vernon Horn and Marquis Jackson for a total of $47 million. Meanwhile, the city is currently appealing a historic $38 million jury award for the wrongful conviction of Stefon Morant . Additional wrongful conviction lawsuits by George Gould, the surviving family of Ronald Taylor , and Dixwell/Newhallville Alder Troy Streater are ongoing. By law, the city is paying for the legal defense of the former police officers facing these lawsuits, and has so far taken the financial responsibility for the settlements.
Asked whether he intends to join these men in suing the city, and whether he plans to submit a wrongful conviction claim to the state, Jones said he isn’t sure. “This is all coming at me at once,” he said. “I haven’t really sat down to really think about all of that stuff right now.”
Jones was convicted “in the same year — months apart, not even in a three months span” from both Carmon and Morant’s co-defendant, Scott Lewis. In the police report detailing Jones’s arrest for Harp’s murder, Detective Thomas Trocchio noted that Vincent Raucci , the detective at the center of the Lewis-Morant case, was present for interactions with Spears. “To anyone that’s looking at the stuff that’s going on with New Haven system, there did seem to be a pattern,” he said.
Jones said that there is a need for a more direct reckoning with the police misconduct underpinning his and others’ wrongful convictions.
“No one is really held accountable,” he said. “Evidence was withheld. Witnesses were coerced or there was some unethical things done” in order to secure a conviction. “Nothing happens to any of the officials who were involved in any of these things.”
Laura Glesby is a staff reporter at the New Haven Independent. You can get in touch with her directly here. More by Laura Glesby