Black man spent months in jail despite video proving he wasn’t at crime scene

Arthur Jones has sued the Hattiesburg Police Department and the detective who pursued charges against him

Arthur Jones spent months in jail despite video showing he was not at the crime scene (Screengrab/WLOX News)

A 29-year-old Black man in the US spent several months in jail despite video footage proving he wasn’t at the crime scene at the time of the incident.

Arthur Jones, also known as AJ, was 23 years old in July 2015 when he was picked up in the murder case of Jabarri Goudy, 17, who was shot twice outside a club in Mississippi state’s Hattiesburg city.

But Mr Jones – who is from Gulfport, over 100 kilometres away – was arrested and charged with the murder of the teenager despite video footage showing him in Gulfport at the time of the killing, reported WLOX News.

“I feel like I lost more than two years because, like I said, I have been dealing with this since I was 23,” Mr Jones, who is sharing his story for the first time, told WLOX. “I’m 29 now, so it’s a lot longer than two years. I’m still dealing with this, in search of justice. My justice,” he added.

Court documents issued by US district judge Taylor McNeel on 28 June 2021 presents a detailed picture of what happened with Mr Jones over the years since July 2015.

The news report said detective Neal Rockhold of the Hattiesburg Police Department was given Goudy’s case. After that, Clark, a friend of Goudy who was with him at the time of the incident, met Mr Rockhold and identified a man from a six-person photo lineup as the passenger in the vehicle that shot Goudy.

However, during the same meeting, Clark was shown a photo of Mr Jones following which he claimed that Goudy was shot by him.

The flip-flop didn’t end there, as two days later Clark picked out another suspect as the shooter when he was shown a different lineup of six people. Within four minutes of that, Clark picked Mr Jones out again and said he was the one who shot Goudy.

The confusion continued as Clark then identified a different person as the passenger in the vehicle, compared to the one he identified earlier.

Later, Goudy’s cousin, who had first told police he did not see the shooter, picked out Mr Jones from a photo lineup.

Mr Jones, who had contacted the Hattiesburg police a day after the shooting to clear his name as his photos were doing the rounds on social media, was confident about walking away safely from the controversy as he was not present in Hattiesburg at the time of the incident.

“I expected to immediately be released because I knew I had evidence, surveillance, of me being in Gulfport at the time of the murder but, unfortunately that is not what transpired,” Mr Jones said.

The video evidence of him being in Gulfport was dismissed by the police at the time and the footage was never presented to the court during an initial hearing, which resulted in Mr Jones remaining in jail.

In March 2016, Detective Rockhold acknowledged that Mr Jones was misidentified, following which he requested bond reductions from the prosecutor. Mr Jones came out of jail in March 2016, but the murder charge against him remained until October 2017.

In August 2018, he filed a lawsuit against the Hattiesburg Police Department, the city of Hattiesburg and the detective who pursued the charges despite the video evidence proving his innocence. In his suit, which is pending, he has alleged false arrest, false imprisonment and denial of a speedy trial.