Elwood Jones, an innocent man, faces execution in Ohio for the 1994 murder of Rhoda Nathan at the Blue Ash, Ohio Embassy Suites Hotel. The State alleged that Elwood, an African-American employee of the hotel, entered Ms. Nathan’s hotel room when her two roommates left for breakfast, then beat her to death and stole her necklace. Elwood has maintained his innocence throughout the decades he has been on death row. Like other capital cases, Elwood's trial was marked by junk science and no substantial proof of his guilt, in addition to racial discrimination. Recently, Elwood uncovered new evidence that another man committed the murder and framed him, a Black man, for it.  The State of Ohio should reopen the investigation so that Elwood Jones's conviction and death sentence can be overturned.

1. Elwood Jones is innocent.

• Elwood voluntarily answered the police's questions on the day of the murder and several employees also reported seeing him working that day and remembered him being clean and acting normally.
• No direct evidence ties Elwood to the violent crime scene: no blood or body fluids, no hair, no fingerprints, no DNA, and no eyewitnesses.
• Months after the murder, the chief of the investigating police force even admitted to the newspaper that the case "doesn't look good" and that the police were "a point here where we’re going to have to find something soon, or put it on the shelf until someone comes forward." No new credible evidence of Elwood's guilt developed after that, yet he was still prosecuted and sentenced to death.

2. Elwood has now discovered that a man named Earl Reed confessed to his wife to both the murder and to framing a Black man for it.

• Earl Reed's wife, Linda Reed, said she did not report her husband’s confession to law enforcement because he was friends with several of the local Blue Ash police officers. But, before Elwood’s trial, Linda was arrested and taken to jail. While there, Linda told another woman about what Earl did, and that woman did report Earl’s confession to the Blue Ash police. Instead of investigating this lead, however, the police dismissed the tip. Worse, they never disclosed this important information to Elwood or his lawyers.

3. Evidence supports the report of Earl Reed's confession.

• Elwood learned about Earl Reed only recently when the woman who reported his confession to the police reached out to him after seeing he was on Death Row with an execution date. Elwood has found proof that this women and Linda Reed were in jail together before Elwood’s trial. He has also corroborated details she remembered Linda disclosing, including that Earl Reed lived just a mile from the hotel.

4. In late 2019, the Hamilton County Court of Common Pleas granted Elwood's motion for a hearing in support of a new trial based on this newly discovered evidence about Earl Reed. In nearly 500 pages of arguments and supporting evidence, Elwood's filing shows why the new evidence would have made a difference in his trial.

• The weak circumstantial case against Elwood at trial was largely based on evidence that just as easily could have applied to a number of hotel employees, guests, and even members of the public.
• Two types of “forensic evidence” the State offered were, in fact, junk science.
• Proof of Earl’s confession would have been powerful evidence to undermine the strongest piece of evidence against Elwood: a pendant, similar to one the victim wore, that an officer said he found in a toolbox in Elwood's car. At trial, a mechanic who had used the toolbox and inventoried its contents after the murder, but before the police impounded the car, testified that the pendant was not in the toolbox then. After the car was impounded, it sat for nearly two days in the police station with the keys left unattended in a nearby desk before it was searched. Earl Reed's confession to framing a Black man for his crime thus explains how a murderer with friends on the police force could have planted the pendant in Elwood's car while it was at the station.

Elwood's hearing was scheduled to go forward in the spring of 2020, but has been repeatedly postponed because of the COVID-19 pandemic. If conditions permit, it will be rescheduled in 2021. If Elwood does not receive relief, the State of Ohio plans to execute him on December 6, 2023.