Man Wins Murder Trial, But Gets Almost 9 Years

Criminal Justice

Man Wins Murder Trial, But Gets Almost 9 Years

Posted Mar 20, 2008, 12:34 pm CST
By Martha Neil

Tyrone Jones didn't have much time to celebrate after a Connecticut jury acquitted him of murder Tuesday.

The next day, the judge in the murder case sent Jones to prison for violating his probation in a previous assault case. The basis of his decision to do so? Testimony by a witness in the murder case, which the jury didn't believe but the judge did, reports the Hartford Courant.

A reasonable doubt standard, of course, applied in the murder trial. However, the judge only had to find by a lesser preponderance standard that Jones committed the crime in order to find him guilty of violating his probation in the prior case, the newspaper notes.

Superior Court Judge Joseph Koletsky gave Jones, 31, eight years and nine months, and the sentence would be unlikely to be overturned even if it is challenged, experts say. Double jeopardy doesn't apply, because the sentence isn't for a guilty finding in the murder case, but concerns an earlier conviction.

"There is no logical contradiction," professor Steven Duke of Yale Law School tells the Courant. "The burden of evidence is different. He's not going to jail because he was convicted of murder. He violated the terms of his probation."

"This happens all the time. Clients just can't believe it," adds Margaret Levy. A lawyer who regularly defends criminal cases in Hartford, she had a client sentenced to a 10-year prison term for probation violation by Koletsky after a jury acquitted the client of robbery. Levy appealed the 10-year prison term, but lost.

While such sentences apparently are legal, Levy questions whether they are appropriate. "It's a question of procedural fairness," she says. "It still doesn't seem legally fair because so often it looks like retribution."

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