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In June 2023, Terrell Jones was acquitted by a jury of his peers in the 2009 murder of Andrew Graham. In total, there were five suspects that were accused of involvement in the murder: Jones, Clarissa Lockhart, Allen Ford, Joseph Martin and Kendall Austin.
Following Jones’s acquittal, six members of the jury took an unusual step. The group went on record criticizing the police in their investigation of the case and the judicial system, and they signaled their intent to send a letter to Gov. Jared Polis asking him to independently investigate the case.
Stephanie Swenson, the jury foreperson in the case, wrote the letter alongside Julie Lyons, Kwame Warner, Rachel Guerrera, Sarah Clark and Alex Keeling. The letter was in support of Jones and the other four accused in the case.
“It is clear to myself and other members of this jury that these five are innocent of this crime and yet 14 years of their lives have been tied up in relentless questioning, threats, intimidation, and prison time,” wrote Swenson.
Swenson wrote that this case should have never gone to trial, and that by the end of this trial, many of the jurors felt betrayed by the system they believed in.
“What was apparent throughout this trial was that the Arapahoe County Sheriff’s Office, unable to resolve this case, fell into a trap of confirmation bias and unethical practices in an effort to bring peace to the community,” Swenson wrote. “There was great pressure to provide answers despite the overwhelming lack of evidence in the case. However, an unintended consequence of this approach is that 14 years later, two different teams of the Arapahoe County Sheriff’s Office have committed egregious actions against the people of Colorado.”
In addition to sending a letter to the governor, the jurors emailed the Korey Wise Innocence Project. Jud Lohnes, a staff attorney at KWIP, told Law Week that they don’t get emails like that a lot.
“That’s the first one, and immediately our interest was piqued, and we began looking into it,” said Lohnes. “And we immediately went down and talked to Clarissa Lockhart, one of the Park Meadows Five.”
Lohnes said the email they received was particularly poignant because in the case of the Exonerated Five in New York, five Black youths were convicted almost entirely on false or coerced confessions.
“Like in the case of Korey Wise, we had confessions from these different young people, who were put under tremendous pressure, whose confessions were internally inconsistent, meaning they changed from one telling to another, they didn’t match up with each other, and they failed to account for the physical evidence, and indeed conflicted with the physical evidence,” said Lohnes.
Three of the accused, Lockhart, Ford and Martin took plea deals in the case. Austin had the charges against him dismissed and sued Arapahoe County.
Of the three, KWIP picked Lockhart’s case. Lohnes said the reason for the decision was that the organization felt that they could do the most good right away in her case.
“She had a really good record in prison and had been denied parole twice, largely because she wouldn’t admit her guilt at the parole hearings,” said Lohnes. “And she couldn’t admit her guilt.”
Lohnes added that Martin has been released, and that they found other attorneys who agreed to represent Ford, who remains in prison. They haven’t found counsel for Martin yet.
John Kellner, district attorney for the 18th Judicial District, told Law Week via email that all of the defendants in the case received due process consistent with the U.S. and Colorado Constitutions and state law.
“[Jones] specifically had an independent judge review an affidavit and find probable cause for his charges before he was arrested,” said Kellner. “He had the effective assistance of defense counsel.”
Kellner noted that an independent judicial officer also found that the evidence met a higher burden of proof to continue to pursue the charges his office had filed.
“Ultimately, not every case works out the way we think it might,” said Kellner. “Regardless of the outcome, we respect the jury’s verdict in this case and appreciate their service. Regarding the plea agreements with the other parties, to-date, no defendant has asked to withdraw from the signed plea agreement.”
At the time of publication, the Arapahoe County Sheriff’s Office hasn’t replied to Law Week.
How the Case Against the Five Developed
On Nov. 5, 2009, Graham was walking back to his home from the Park Meadows light rail station. He was preparing for graduate school at the University of Colorado Boulder and had just gone to meet his new roommates.
On that walk, he was shot and killed. In the surveillance video pulled in the case, Lohnes said no suspects were identified. And while a foreign DNA profile was found on Graham’s bag, it matched none of the five accused.
In their letter, the jurors stated there was no physical evidence, weapons, ballistics, fingerprints, DNA, eyewitnesses, security footage or cell phone tracing linking any of the five to the crime.
“So the police developed tunnel vision, and without any physical evidence or suspects, they began investigating a group of Black youths who had committed some crimes on the 16th Street Mall,” said Lohnes. “And they just began interrogating these people.”
Two years after Graham’s murder, a grand jury was convened, and indictments were sought against Jones, Lockhart and Ford. Lohnes said that 63 witnesses were called, but the grand jury didn’t come back with charges.
“And they found, while law enforcement did obtain statements from individuals who indicated they may have been present, or that they knew who was present, the grand jury learned that these statements had been changed, recanted, conflicted with objective physical evidence or were based not upon firsthand knowledge, but rather upon mostly unidentified sources,” said Lohnes.
Six years after the murder, the Arapahoe County Sheriff’s office resumed its investigation. Lohnes said investigators interrogated people again, using coercive tactics.
In their letter, the jurors wrote about some of the tactics used by Cold Case Investigator Bruce Isaacson and the cold case team in these interrogations.
“His tactics included, but were not limited to: researching and printing images of Joseph Martin’s child from Facebook and then retraumatizing this marginalized youth by threatening the custody of his child to foster care, making hand-shake deals for ‘no punishment’ for cooperation with Clarissa Lockhart (who is currently serving a 10 year sentence), continuing an interrogation of Kendall Austin after asking for a lawyer, and falsifying documents against all of the accused to threaten arrest warrants for first degree murder,” wrote Swenson.
Lohnes said that during interrogation, Lockhart told them stories of what happened that were inconsistent with her prior statements, and told the police that she and the others must have arrived by light rail because there was a video showing they did.
A second grand jury convened in 2016, returning with indictments against Lockhart, Ford, Austin and Martin. Jones would later be charged separately, according to Lohnes.
In 2017, Martin entered a guilty plea and agreed to testify truthfully at trials of any of the other co-defendants, according to Lohnes. In 2019, charges were dismissed against Austin. Later that year, Ford pled guilty to a Colorado Organized Crime Control Act charge and received 20 years. Lohnes said Ford and Martin both gave false confessions.
Then in 2020, Lockhart entered a guilty plea to a COCCA charge, which dismissed the murder charge against her, and she received a 10-year sentence with the same stipulation to testify truthfully in any trials of her co-defendants, according to Lohnes.
At the trial, Lohnes told Law Week that Ford refused to testify and Lockhart testified that she had falsely confessed.
“That was a big moment for Clarissa, because she finally had the opportunity to tell her story,” said Lohnes. “What had happened to her when she was interrogated, how she felt when she was interrogated, why she broke down and admitted to something she didn’t do. And it also gave her an opportunity to tell the truth that she didn’t know anything about what happened here.”
Kellner told Law Week that Jones challenged the statements and confessions of the co-defendants as part of the court process.
“These statements were evaluated by an independent judicial officer who found those statements were given freely and voluntarily,” said Kellner.
Moving Forward
While the case is compelling, it’s also a large one, and Lohnes said there are thousands of pages of discovery and hours and hours of video and interrogation to review.
“Whenever you engage in this type of post-conviction investigation and litigation, it’s a marathon, not a sprint,” said Lohnes. “But it’s so clear to us that none of these five youths are guilty of the crimes that they pled guilty to.”
The first goal for Lohnes and KWIP is to get Lockhart out of prison. While the last parole hearing didn’t result in her being released, Lohnes hopes that they’ll have better success next time.
How they proceed after that will depend on their investigation into the case. Lohnes noted that Lockhart’s guilty plea makes it more difficult to overturn a conviction.
Lohnes said that there are avenues for relief, including parole, clemency or commutation from the governor and several legal avenues, but that they can’t map out their litigation strategy until they know what needs to be tested and investigated more.
“We know that the DNA evidence that we have so far has excluded them, but we’re curious as to whether additional DNA testing could be done to identify the true perpetrator,” said Lohnes.
Preventing False Confessions
“I think all Coloradans should be very interested in this case,” said Lohnes. “Because I think the people of Colorado don’t realize that these sorts of injustices happen.”
He believes if people in the state knew about this case, jurors would be less likely to believe false confessions and police might better understand the damage done in trying to get someone to confess without evidence. He added that it could also lead to legal reforms in the criminal justice system.
“But even if it didn’t result in those sorts of tangible reforms, I think it would demonstrate to the people of Colorado that we have to be really cautious before we convict people based on confessions that are likely false,” said Lohnes.
The Colorado Legislature did recently add a law on the books related to interrogations, House Bill 23-1042, that made confessions by juveniles inadmissible in court if a law enforcement official lied to them during the interrogation.
Lohnes thinks an extension of this act to all Coloradans, not just juveniles, would help everyone in the state.
“I understand the police and prosecutors alike feel that the ability of police to lie to suspects is a powerful tool in getting them to confess, but it’s not the best way to discover the truth,” said Lohnes. “In fact, we often end up with falsehoods instead of the truth.”