Send Me Home 2018 - Independent online -
Death Row was like a prison within a prison. You get two hours of rec a week and the rest of the time you’re just stuck in your cell … I had no reason of right to be here … Nobody cares or believes that you’re innocent in prison … A struggle every day to maintain being Ricky Jackson, to sustain Ricky Jackson. Send Me Home, short 13:28 2018
Ending a startling miscarriage of justice spanning nearly four decades, a judge in Cleveland, Ohio has exonerated a man convicted of aggravated murder after the only prosecution witness in his trial came forward and admitted he made up his testimony.
Ricky Jackson, who is now 59, is expected to be released on Friday after spending 39 years in prison for the killing in May 1975 of a money-order collector in Cleveland. He and two other men, who were brothers, were found guilty by a jury based on the testimony of a 12-year-old boy.
But at a hearing in Cleveland this week that witness, Eddy Vernon, who is now 51, stepped forward and confessed that, in fact, he never saw the attack and that the details of what happened had been fed to him by police. He was told that his parents would be arrested if he changed his story. Independent online article 20 November 2014, ‘Ricky Jackson freed: American prisoner to be released after 39 years in behind bars as witness says he made it all up’