In a spooky case of mistaken identity, a man regained his freedom 17 years after it was discovered he was convicted for a crime committed by his lookalike.
Richard Jones was handed a 19-year prison sentence in 1999 based on eyewitness accounts of a in Roeland Park, Kansas.
Back then, an attempted purse-snatching in a Walmart parking lot resulted in a woman scraping her knee as three drug-addled men made off with her cell phone.
The victim had not seen any of her attackers’ faces and relied mostly upon skin tone while the other witness, a Walmart security guard, did not see the crime itself but chased the car in order to identify its license number.
Two of the three men involved in the robbery identified a ‘Ricky’ as the third person involved.
But Richard, who lives in Kansas City, Missouri was the one convicted despite stating he was with his girlfriend and other family members at the time of the incident which happened across the state line in Kansas City, Kansas.
With similar first names, height (both are six feet tall), weight (they weigh around 200lbs), facial hair and being born only a year apart, the likeness discovered between the two men left authorities stunned.
‘When we pulled up the photos we were shocked,’ said University of Kansas Innocence Project attorney, Alice Craig.
‘We actually pulled it up in the middle of the law clinic class, with all the interns. Everyone was just floored.’
Richard, the innocent doppelganger’s road to freedom started when other inmates at Lansing Correctional Facility where he was imprisoned told him there was another inmate in another facility who looked just like him.
He subsequently reached out to attorneys at the Midwest Innocence Project and the Project for Innocence at the University of Kansas Law School, who tracked down Ricky Amos.
‘When I saw that picture, it just made sense to me,’ Jones said. ‘They say you can’t see the picture clearly if you [are] in it, but if I was outside this picture I would have seen the same thing.’
Amos is not charged with the robbery and has denied any involvement.
He’s currently incarcerated in Sedgwick County, Kansas after being sentenced on April 13 for twice failing to register as a sex offender related to a 2003 sexual battery charge.
Jones meanwhile was greeted upon his release last Thursday by his two daughters; who were toddlers at the time of his arrest in 1999, as well as his young granddaughter.
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