CINCINNATI — Judge Wende Cross on Wednesday dealt a heavy blow to the prosecution's case against a man once sitting on death row for murder, ruling testimony from a now-dead police officer would be excluded from Elwood Jones' new trial.
"I didn't order a retrial," Cross said to both counsels. "I ordered a new trial."
Prosecutors argued Det. Michael Bray's testimony in Jones's original 1996 trial for the 1994 murder of Rhoda Nathan in Blue Ash was critical to the state's case.
"Your ruling today, excluding Detective Bray, makes it impossible to move forward with the case," one member of the prosecutor's team told Judge Cross.
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Judge Cross had previously ordered Jones's conviction overturned due to prosecutors not turning a significant amount of exculpatory evidence over to Jones's defense counsel.
Jones's attorneys, Jay Clark and David Hine, argued the roughly 4,000 pages of evidence kept from their client's original defense by prosecutors make Bray's testimony useless and confusing to jurors.
"That turns a second trial which should be absolutely focused on whether or not the state can prove beyond a reasonable doubt that Jones is guilty of murder, it turns it into a circus," Hine said.
Cross, from the bench, agreed with the defense's position of what would happen if Bray's testimony was allowed.
"I think the second trial is going to just be permeated with what the state did and what the state didn't do in the first trial," she said.
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Clark said Jones was happy with the latest ruling, but emphasized that the battle for his ensured freedom is far from over.
"He's very happy, but you still have to remember he's had 27 years of his life stolen," Clark said.
Hine added Jones had been conditioned by nearly 30 years of losses in the court to expect the worse.
"I think there's a part of him that's still waiting for the other shoe to drop, for the system to come back and kick him in the pants," he said.
Judge Cross, in closing Wednesday's hearing, wanted to make her position clear to prosecutors.
"Let me be clear," she said. "The court is not making its rulings to gut the state's case. That may be the impact, but it's not the motive of the court. The court is doing its best just to follow the law."
Jones's second trial is slated to resume in February with a final pre-trial hearing scheduled for Jan. 4.
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