![]() ![]() Jordan, however, was far from an unimpeachable witness. Jordan said Jones was the one who killed Paul Howell, and had confessed to him, which he denies. An acquaintance of Jones, Jordan made a deal with prosecutors and was sentenced to 30 years in prison rather than the death penalty, pleading that he had been an accomplice to the murder. ![]() Oklahoma’s most important pieces of evidence, however, came from Chris Jordan. (David McKenzie, Jones’s original trial lawyer, has said over the years he could have put on a stronger defence, but argued recently that the Jones family alibi was “completely bogus, false, and could not have been run for a bunch of reasons.” He told News 9 he declined to have them on the stand because “I needed his parents not to get up on the stand and lie.”) This effectively consigned him to silence for the next 20 years without ever being able to share his side of the story in a court setting before his testimony at a clemency hearing this November. Yet the case was anything but straightforward.Īt trial, a pair of public defenders inexperienced in capital cases represented Jones, declining to call any witnesses on his behalf and advising him not to testify in his own defence, even though his family swore he was at home when the murder took place. Jones also pleaded guilty to an armed carjacking that took place less than a week before Paul Howell was killed. ![]() They based their conclusion off of eyewitnesses who said they saw Jones driving the stolen SUV and confessing to the murder, as well as police searches which uncovered the murder weapon wrapped in a red bandanna at Jones’s home, later shown to contain Jones’s DNA. Police eventually singled out Jones, a 19-year-old university student at the time, as the one who pulled the trigger. ![]()
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