For This Innocent Victim, Justice Appears to Be Anything but Swift

Hayden Jones spends the last days of his life watching legal dramas on television, wondering how his life might have unfolded with Perry Mason or Matlock on his side.

The 72-year-old Jones, sick with cancer and emphysema and virtually destitute, has little else to occupy his mind, other than an overwhelming desire to see the state repair a mistake that cost him 20 years.

Forty-seven years ago, Jones was imprisoned for crimes he did not commit. He was not freed until 1968, years after his accusers admitted to lying in court.

Since his release, Jones has struggled personally, physically and financially. He lives alone in a dingy basement apartment in this working-class neighborhood near Philadelphia, subsisting on help from friends and a monthly $490 Supplemental Security Income check. He has no known living relatives.

Over the years, several politicians have sponsored legislation to compensate Jones, but nothing has come of the efforts. Jones believes his time is running out.

“I’m an old man now,” said Jones, pausing between words as a concession to the vocal cord he lost to cancer. A short man, 5 foot, 3 inches, with thinning gray hair, his weight is down to 135 pounds.

“My life’s just about over.”

Jones’ ordeal began in 1949, when he was a 25-year-old Army private enjoying a 10-day furlough in Pittsburgh.

According to Jones, a police officer grabbed him as he walked out of a movie theater and placed him under arrest.

“Police told me they wanted $1,000, and if I didn’t pay, they’d put trumped-up charges on me, and I’d go to jail,” he said. “I told them I wasn’t going to pay.”

Injustice was swift. Within four months, Jones was convicted of molesting four boys and was sentenced to 15 to 20 years in prison.

Jones made a poor prisoner, extending his sentence to 30 years through misconduct. He got involved in a prison riot and continued to defy authority while protesting his innocence. He said prison guards beat and tortured him, sprayed him with gas that smelled like ammonia and kept him in solitary confinement.

“They wouldn’t let me contact anybody, not even the Army,” Jones said. “The Army had me down as AWOL.”

Two of four boys who testified against Jones recanted in 1956, stating in written affidavits that police officers had forced them to frame Jones.

“The reason I testified the way I did against an innocent man was because of fear, coercion and intimidation by the police officers,” one boy wrote.

The judge who presided at Jones’ trial dismissed the statements. Jones lingered in prison another 12 years.

In 1968, Jones crossed paths with another inmate, Thomas Weismantle, who was serving time for failing to pay alimony.

They had seen each other before--at Jones’ trial in 1949. Weismantle was one of the boys who had been pressured into testifying against Jones.

Weismantle immediately volunteered to help Jones, who had a hearing before Allegheny County Judge Henry Ellenbogen. After listening to Weismantle and reviewing the affidavits of the two other boys who admitted to lying, Ellenbogen concluded that the case had but one victim: Jones.

“An exhaustive review of the record and testimony . . . lends strong support to the conclusion that . . . the verdicts against Jones are based, at least to a significant extent, on perjured testimony,” Ellenbogen wrote.

Jones had little outside prison. His wife and three children were long dead, killed in an automobile accident on the way to a prison visit.

Jones also had few job skills or friends, leading him to live a hermitic existence.

“I was reliving the past all the time. I never really pulled myself together,” he says. “A lot of people couldn’t understand how I didn’t go out of my mind.”

In 1972, the Statehouse passed a bill to pay Jones $133,000, but the measure died in the Senate. U.S. Sen. John Heinz later introduced federal legislation to compensate Jones, but the effort faded when Heinz died in an airplane crash in 1991.

Last year, the Pennsylvania Senate passed a bill that would pay Jones $325,000. Opponents in the Statehouse are blocking the effort, however, believing the payment could pave the way for more wrongful imprisonment claims.

State Sen. Robert Tomlinson, who sponsored the legislation, believes the case is one of a kind.

“As people find out more and more about the particulars of the Hayden Jones case, there’s less and less talk about it setting a precedent,” Tomlinson says. “There are so many factors that set this case apart from anything else.”

Other advocates also are working on Jones’ behalf, including members of the Veterans of Foreign Wars, who have sent letters and signed petitions in support of the Senate bill.

Jones must leave the battle to others. Suffering from throat cancer, emphysema and heart trouble, he has little energy for anything except episodes of “Perry Mason” and “Matlock,” old TV series that feature lawyers proving their defendants’ innocence.

“That’s the only place you see real justice done,” Jones said.