A juror in his trial reportedly used the same slur and suggested that Jones should be taken out and shot. Jones’ arresting officer used the n-word and dared him to run, implying he’d be shot. Two people involved in the case have since signed sworn affidavits that Jones was not responsible for the crime, and his main accuser is the person Jones’ legal team says is the murderer. Soon after the first meeting, she founded the Julius Jones Coalition and set about rallying celebrities, legal minds and ordinary Oklahomans to make noise about the holes in the case against Jones. “What we did was, we committed to doing something.” “I didn’t have a criminal justice background I wasn’t a lawyer,” she said. As she learned more about the case, she described waking up each morning “newly enraged about what was happening to Julius and his family,” prompting her to set up more community programs, start a social media plan, or meet with another legislator. (AP Photo/Sue Ogrocki)īut by the time she became interested in Julius Jones, Jones-Davis was a stay-at-home mom in Edmond, outside Oklahoma City. Cece Jones-Davis, far right, helps carry the march banner. 25, 2021, in Oklahoma City, where they presented a petition with over 6.2 million signatures, calling for Jones’ death sentence to be commuted. Supporters of Julius Jones, who has been on death row in Oklahoma for two decades, march to the offices of the Oklahoma Pardon and Parole Board, Thursday, Feb. trade representative under President Obama. (While in New Haven she also studied at the Yale Institute of Sacred Music.) Her resume also includes a stint as a special assistant to the U.S. In biographical sketches about her, Jones-Davis lists “singer” among her credentials, sometimes saying music is her ministry. “Whether it was with HIV/AIDS advocacy, whether it was women and girls’ issues, whether it was racial justice and now criminal justice reform, I’ve always worked at the intersection of faith and social justice.” “Since my time in seminary, I knew, I felt very deeply that I wasn’t on a traditional ministry track,” she said. “It was something about that humble gesture,” said Jones-Davis, who called it a “confirmation from God” that she was to continue to help them.Ī graduate of Yale Divinity School, Jones-Davis had long known that leading a church was not her calling. death row inmate hail parole board’s commutation request After they left, her server told her that they paid for her meal in gratitude for her calling the meeting. But after relieving her babysitter and allowing her daughter to pick a restaurant for dinner, they ended up at the same place as the Jones family. Jones-Davis left the meeting convinced there was more to be done but didn’t know exactly how to proceed. Her brother, now 41, had already been on death row for two decades, despite shaky DNA evidence and his public defender’s admission that he had badly misrepresented Jones at his trial.Īmong the attorney’s missteps was not allowing Jones to give his alibi: He and his family maintain that Jones, then an athlete attending the University of Oklahoma on an academic scholarship, was at home sharing a dinner of spaghetti and cornbread the night Paul Howell was murdered during a carjacking outside his parents’ home in Edmond.īut Antoinette and other Jones family members were among the 30 people who showed up at a church in an Oklahoma City suburb in response to Jones-Davis’ invitation, along with his lawyers and others who believed he was wrongfully convicted. Julius Jones’ sister, Antoinette, remembers thinking, “Who is this lady?” The title of her Facebook post was “Where do we go from here?” Jones-Davis, who is no relation to Julius Jones, only knew what she’d recently seen in an ABC documentary about prisoners whose convictions are widely questioned. Cece Jones-Davis, a Disciples of Christ minister in Oklahoma, put a post on Facebook announcing a meeting for anyone interested in the case of Julius Jones, a death-row inmate at Oklahoma State Penitentiary.
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