Last week, 62-year-old Jesse Lee Johnson walked out of Marion County Jail in Salem, Oregon, a free man — after having spent 25 years in prison, many of them on death row, for a crime he did not commit. He was joyous and had every right and reason to be.
Johnson had originally been convicted for the 1998 stabbing murder of an acquaintance, 28-year-old Harriet Thompson, but his conviction was overturned in 2021 due to the testimony of a witness that the police investigating the case had actively ignored.
He hasn’t been exonerated. The case against him has been dismissed without prejudice — meaning that the state can try to convict him again if they find new evidence — on the grounds that prosecutors don’t think they can make the case.
“Based on the amount of time that has passed and the unavailability of critical evidence in this case, the state no longer believes that it can prove the defendant’s guilt to twelve jurors beyond a reasonable doubt,” deputy district attorneys Katie Suver and Matt Kemmy wrote in a motion.
To be clear, there was no “critical evidence” in the case to begin with. The “evidence” in the case was a $5 bill in his wallet, jewelry he said he had purchased from her and his fingerprints on a beer bottle in her home — which was not actually that unusual given that he had said that he knew her and had admitted to being in her home, along with several other people, earlier in the evening. Neither his DNA nor his fingerprints were found on the knife used to kill Thompson or the plunger used to attempt to flush it down the toilet, and he was not a match to the person who had sex with Thompson earlier that evening.
The primary witnesses against Johnson were a meth head named “Donald Blocker, who claimed Johnson had admitted to the killing while selling the jewelry, and jailhouse informant Robert Schellong, who told the jury that Johnson was angry at Thompson for refusing to sell him drugs.” According to Johnson’s attorneys, both witnesses changed their stories multiple times and had “incentives” to testify against him.
The new witness, a neighbor of Thompson’s, said that she tried to give the police information on two occasions at the time but was dismissed because she said she saw a white man who looked like Charles Manson leaving the house and the cops were insistent that a Black man was responsible.
Via Oregon Live:
In a 2013 deposition, [neighbor Patricia] Hubbard said she heard a loud fight and then saw a scrawny, long-haired white man bolt out of Thompson’s home around 3:45 a.m. on the day of the killing.
Hubbard said she approached police later at the crime scene but was told, “It’s a known drug house … we don’t need your help,’” according to the deposition.
A Salem detective later followed up, according to Hubbard, but when she told him about the white man the detective replied that, “a [racist slur] got murdered, and a [racist slur] is going to pay for it.’”
Johnson is Black, as was Thompson.
So basically, if police had simply listened to this one woman back in 1998, this man would not have lost 25 years of his life. How is that not a crime? How on earth are we okay with the fact that these kinds of things regularly happen and no one is held responsible?
But even without Hubbard’s testimony, there was never enough evidence in this case to determine “beyond a reasonable doubt” that Johnson had killed Thompson. It was circumstantial from the very beginning and the fact that the state was actually going to kill him based on so little evidence is horrifying.
And yet, prosecutors are still refusing to admit that anything went wrong here. One of them has gone so far as to try to discredit Hubbard’s testimony, calling it “fantastical.” The state even refused to provide Johnson with any of the “gate money” that is traditionally given to incarcerated people whose cases are dismissed in order to help them build a new life. He’s been let out of prison, but he has nothing (a fundraiser for him can be found here). It’s not right. Even if prosecutors want to believe he’s guilty, the state still stole 25 years of his life and were going to steal all of it without what they admit is not enough evidence to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that he was guilty. Police officers still ignored witnesses who didn’t tell them the story they wanted to hear. Some responsibility needs to be taken for that.
