How Ricky Jackson spent 40 years in prison

Ricky Jackson was 18-years-old when the Police in Cleveland, Ohio, United States allegedly framed him up and assisted to get him convicted for a crime he did not commit.
Jackson was jailed for murder alongside two others, and his conviction was backed up by the testimony of a 12-year-old.
Newsreportersng.com gathered that Ricky Jackson and Wiley Bridgeman were both friends and the two were sentenced to die for a crime they did not commit.
Jackson’s death sentence was commuted in 1977 due to a mistake in jury instructions. Wiley Bridgeman originally received a death sentence, but it was commuted to life imprisonment. Ronnie Bridgeman, Wiley’s brother, was also convicted to die, for assisting Ricky and Wiley.

Jackson, now 58, was exonerated in November after the witness, who is now in his early 50s, recanted his testimony.
The witness, identified as Eddie Vernon, said in 2013 that police detectives threatened to put his parents in jail and coerced him into implicating Jackson and the two brothers, Wiley and Ronnie Bridgeman, in the killing of salesman Harold Franks outside a corner store.
Jackson’s attorneys say their client is believed to have served the longest prison term in the US for someone wrongfully convicted.
Jackson and the Bridgeman brothers were arrested in 1975 in Cleveland, Ohio as the alleged perpetrators of the murder of businessman Harold Franks on May 19 1975. Authorities believed that Jackson and Wiley Bridgeman attacked Franks as he walked to the store. The perpetrators reportedly beat him, threw acid in his face and one of the men shot him twice with a .38 caliber gun. The shooter also fired a round that hit the wife of the store’s owner, Anna Robinson. The men stole Franks’ briefcase and fled to a waiting car allegedly driven by Ronnie Bridgeman.
Authorities built their case against Jackson and the Bridgemans based on the testimony of a 12-year-old Eddie Vernon, who is now in his early 50s. Although there were no other witnesses nor evidence to incriminate the accused, Vernon said a friend gave him the men’s names, and told the police he saw the killing. In 2014, in a signed affidavit recanting his testimony, Vernon said he was coerced by the police into testifying against Jackson and the Bridgeman brothers, and was not close to the murder, as the school bus he rode with other children was a block away from the crime scene, the Fairmont Cut-Rite on Fairhill Road in Cleveland, which is now Stokes Boulevard.
The exoneration process that led to the release and exoneration of Jackson and Wiley Bridgeman began with a story published in Scene Magazine in 2011 that detailed flaws in their case, including Vernon’s questionable testimony. Vernon recanted his testimony when a minister visited him at a hospital in 2013. During a court hearing on November 18, 2014 Vernon described the threats by detectives and the burden of guilt he had carried. On November 20 Cuyahoga County prosecutors filed a motion to dismiss charges against Jackson and Bridgeman. They were released at separate court hearings on the next day. When released, Jackson said he does not “hate him” (Vernon): “He’s a grown man today, he was just a boy back then”. In December 2014 Ronnie Bridgeman (who then used the name Kwame Ajamu) was also exonerated for his conviction as part of the killing.
Jackson has however file a suit against the officer that coerced the 12-year-old into framing him.
The lawsuit alleges that eight officers, including detectives and their supervisors, were involved in framing the three. Some of the officers are now dead.
A statement from the Chicago law firm that filed the lawsuit said Jackson’s mother, father, stepfather and other relatives died while he was incarcerated and that he was assaulted and injured physically while behind bars.
“This lawsuit seeks compensation for that grievous injustice,” attorney Jon Loevy said in the statement. “We now know substantially more about the fallibility of eyewitness identifications. Too many people have been sent to prison wrongfully based on bogus identifications.”
A spokesman said Tuesday that the city of Cleveland doesn’t comment on pending litigation.
In March, the state of Ohio paid Jackson just over $1m in compensation for the decades he spent in prison.
The lawsuit details how officers coerced Vernon into implicating the men. Vernon has stated, and the lawsuit repeats, that he was on a school bus and heard the fatal gunshots but did not see the shooting itself. Detectives ignored a suspect who had been implicated by informants and his own mother, the lawsuit said. That suspect was convicted a few years later of multiple counts of armed robbery.
Jackson was roughed up during a police interrogation, the lawsuit said. Two detectives “repeatedly put a phone book on Mr Jackson’s face and other areas of his body and hit him through it so that it would not leave any marks,” the lawsuit says, but Jackson continued to deny he killed anyone.
After Vernon failed to pick out Jackson and the Bridgemans from a lineup, detectives yelled and screamed at Vernon and threatened to put his father and his ill mother in jail unless he identified the men as Franks’s killers, the lawsuit says.
The lawsuit alleges that detectives helped fabricate Vernon’s trial testimony and falsified investigative reports.