KS - Inmate released after 17 years when doppelganger implicated in crime

Richard Jones spent 17 years in prison for a crime he has always insisted he didn't commit. Then attorneys discovered he had a doppelganger: a man who looked nearly identical to him and had a similar name.

On Thursday, Jones was released from prison after witnesses said they could barely tell the difference between the two men and no longer thought Jones was guilty.

Jones told the Kansas City Star that seeing the photo helped him finally understand what had confused and angered him for so many years.

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<snip> http://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news...ter-doppelganger-found-17-years-later-n770951

Ricky Amos had been in and out of prison since the 1990s, and at some point throughout the time that Jones was behind bars, the two men ended up in the same Kansas Department of Corrections facility. Inmates told Jones that a man who looks just like him was also a prisoner there. “Hey, you were in the cafeteria and you didn’t say hello to me,” others said, according to his attorney.

[...]

Craig, an attorney for the University of Kansas School of Law Project for Innocence, took over Jones’s case in 2015 — 15 years into his prison sentence and after Jones had lost in all of his appeals. He told her about his doppelganger. Slowly, things began to unravel.

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<snip> https://www.washingtonpost.com/news...like-the-real-suspect/?utm_term=.b3217481a836

http://www.kansascity.com/news/local/article155916519.html</snip></snip>

Ugh it is so enraging that this man not only served 17 years in prison for something he didn't do, but because of how he LOOKED. Did they have nothing else to prove he did it? Furthermore, 19 year mandatory minimum for snatching a woman's phone, resulting in a scraped knee, is outrageous. Meanwhile you have a kid who knowingly sold a fatal synthetic drug to kids in a high school, resulting in Tara Fitzgerald's death, and he gets 4 years in prison on 3rd degree murder.