12 Jun Kansas City Prisoner Says He’s “Blessed” To Be Released After Lookalike Found

To most of us, serving time for a crime you didn’t commit sounds like the plot of a Hollywood blockbuster. Sadly, it is a reality for some who are wrongly incarcerated. A report published by the National Registry of Exonerations, a project of the University of Michigan Law School, found that 149 people in the US were cleared for crimes they didn’t commit in 2015. Ten years before this, the figure was 61 – showing a staggering rise in exonerations between 2005 and 2015.

In 1999, two men picked up a man named ‘Rick’ at a house in Kansas City, Kansas and this marked the beginning of an unfortunate miscarriage of justice. The men drove to Walmart to get money for drugs but once they parked, ‘Rick’ suddenly attacked a nearby woman in an attempt to steal her purse and grabbed her phone. All witnesses, including the driver of the vehicle, described ‘Rick’ as a Hispanic or light-skinned African American man. Based on this description, and the following mugshots, Richard Johnson was arrested.

Richard Jones from Kansas City, Missouri, however maintained that he had little connection with the Kansas side of Kansas City. He did not go by the nickname ‘Rick’ and two people testified providing him with an alibi for the time of the attack. His lawyers also stated that he was with his girlfriend and her family at the time of the robbery. Still, despite the lack of DNA and forensic evidence, Richard Jones was convicted of robbery and sent to prison. However, in an unbelievable turn of events, Richard’s lookalike – who happens to go by the name ‘Rick’ – has now been identified, thus casting doubt on Richard’s guilt.

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