Crime · Kansas · 1999–2018

Seventeen Years in Prison for Another Man’s Face

A first name was becoming a route to the wrong person.

1. A robbery in a parking lot

In May 1999, a man tried to take a woman’s purse outside a Kansas store and escaped with her mobile phone. Investigators followed information about the getaway car and a passenger known as Rick. The search moved toward photographs of people with matching names, making a partial description and an uncertain identification central to the emerging case.

A first name was becoming a route to the wrong person.

2. The photograph selected

A witness selected Richard Jones from a database of photographs. Later lineups also pointed toward him, despite problems in how the alternatives were presented. Jones had an alibi and lacked a physical feature described by one witness, but the prosecution proceeded without forensic evidence connecting him to the robbery scene or the stolen property.

The photograph was doing work the physical evidence could not.

3. Nineteen years imposed

Jones was convicted in 2001 and sentenced to nineteen years. His family’s account of where he had been did not prevent the jury from accepting the identification evidence. The conviction demonstrates how a series of identifications can look mutually reinforcing even when they arise from procedures that narrow attention toward the same initially selected person.

Repeated recognition can repeat an error rather than correct it.

4. Another Rick appears

While imprisoned, Jones learned of Ricky Amos, a man who looked remarkably like him. Lawyers investigating the case found connections between Amos and the location where the getaway driver said Rick had been picked up. The resemblance therefore became relevant through corroborating circumstances, rather than simply through the discovery that two unrelated men happened to share similar faces.

The lookalike also fitted a place the original investigation had neglected.

5. The witnesses see both

When witnesses were shown photographs of Jones and Amos, their confidence in the original identification weakened. Some could not distinguish the men reliably. Amos denied involvement and was not convicted in the case. The new evidence mattered because it undermined proof against Jones, not because the court first had to secure a conviction against someone else.

The certainty disappeared when the alternative finally entered the picture.

6. The conviction is vacated

In June 2017, a judge vacated Jones’s conviction, and prosecutors dismissed the charge. The ruling followed work by the University of Kansas innocence project and the Midwest Innocence Project. The legal correction came after nearly seventeen years of lost freedom, showing that overturning an unreliable conviction can establish injustice without restoring the time already taken from the person wrongly imprisoned.

The case ended years before the damage could stop being felt.

7. Compensation cannot return the years

Jones later received a declaration of innocence and a compensation award of about 1.1 million dollars from Kansas. That award acknowledged harm, but did not turn imprisonment into an experience that could be undone. The documented reversal remains a photograph problem: an identification that seemed decisive became doubtful when investigators finally considered a remarkably similar face.

The new photograph arrived far later than the first one’s consequences.