00:00:03
Speaker 1: On April ninth, nineteen ninety seven, sometime before one am, two Buffalo police officers were shot, one in the ankle while the other was killed. The surviving officer gave a description that was echoed by two others, a light skinned mail about five to nine in dark clothing. That morning, nearly a half mile from the scene, police found some personal effects belonging to Jonathan Parker, a local young man with a criminal record who was in the middle of fighting another case. And even though Jonathan didn't match the description, he was identified by three alleged eyewitnesses, while the surviving officer would not join them. This is wrongful conviction.

00:00:52
Speaker 2: Hey, y'all, it's Maggie. I'm here to tell you about a new show I've been working on for the past two years. It's called Graves County and it's an investigative series about the murder of a young mom in Kentucky and just how far our legal system will go in order to find someone to blame. Here is the trailer for Graves County.

00:01:16
Speaker 1: All I know is what I've been told, and that's a half truth, is a whole lie.

00:01:21
Speaker 2: For almost a decade, the murder of an eighteen year old girl from a small town in Graves County, Kentucky, went unsolved until a local homemaker, a journalist, and a handful of girls came forward with a story.

00:01:37
Speaker 3: I'm telling you, we know Quentyner.

00:01:40
Speaker 2: We know a story that law enforcement used to convict six people, and that got the citizen investigator on national TV.

00:01:49
Speaker 4: Through sheer persistence and nerve, this Kentucky housewife helped give justice to Jessica Current.

00:01:55
Speaker 2: My name is Maggie Freeling. I'm a Pulitzer Prize winning journalist, sir, and I wouldn't be here if the truth were that easy to find.

00:02:06
Speaker 3: I did not know her, and I did not kill her or rat or burn or any of that other stuff that y'all said it.

00:02:11
Speaker 5: They literally made me say that I took a match and struck and threw it on her. They made me say that I'm pore guests on her.

00:02:19
Speaker 2: From LoVa for Good. This is Graves County, a show about just how far our legal system will go in order to find someone to blame MARKA.

00:02:30
Speaker 3: Y'all gotta work the hell up. Bad things happens to good people in small towns.

00:02:38
Speaker 2: Listen to Graves County in the Bone Valley Feed starting September seventeenth on the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts, and to binge the entire season ad free. Subscribe to LoVa for Good plus on Apple Podcasts.

00:03:04
Speaker 1: Welcome back to Wrongful Conviction, where we've got a story that's been on our radar and living rent free in my head since we interviewed Keyante Rix back in the summer of twenty twenty, and we've held back on it as we were waiting for the case to make its way through court. But we can't wait any longer. So calling in now from a prison in upstate New York, we've got the man himself, Jonathan Parker. Thank you for calling in, Jonathan, no problem, I appreciate you and joining him. We have the paralegal who worked on Kanty Rix's case, Carl Deviver, and well we're going to link Kyante's story in the episode description. You have to hear it to believe it. Carl, Thanks for being here.

00:03:41
Speaker 5: Thanks for being somebody willing to do something to help Jonathan man.

00:03:45
Speaker 1: Carl didn't start out as a paralegal.

00:03:48
Speaker 5: I had been a police offer shake twenty seven years. I didn't like what I saw wrongfully convicted people riding away in jail for crimes they did not commit, and felt that I should use what energy I have to try to seek syndication. So I studied law and switched into that.

00:04:11
Speaker 1: Also, we have Jonathan's attorney, Stephen Metcalf. Stephen, thanks for being here absolutely. So let's start by hearing about Jonathan's childhood in Buffalo. How was it growing up there?

00:04:22
Speaker 6: I grew up on the east side of Buffalo to the projects, about the age of seven or eight years old. About the purchase the house, which was three blocks away from the projects. At the age of about duty to fourteen, I started getting into problems in school, maybe you know, disruptive in class. I didn't get into too many fights, just you know, general things that teenage boys do. So they sitting to was known as Buffalo Alternative School. Into more trouble, I was placed in a group of homes was known as Lincoln All from fifteen to sixteen could be released from Lincoln Hall again went to Buffalo Alternative High School. Once you do a lot of time, we returned to a normal high school of South Park High School didn't want to accept me because I was a year behind, and I kind of dropped out of high school, at which point I got involved in quote unquote the street life.

00:05:25
Speaker 1: If anyone ever wanted to know what the praise school to prison pipeline means, it sounds like Jonathan is the living proof of it. During the crack epidemic, no less, and this area in East Buffalo, specifically on Gerard Place, was an open air drug market which came along with extreme poverty and occasional bursts of violence.

00:05:46
Speaker 7: It was a violent period of the city of Buffalo, a lot of crime, young men involved in the street life, shooting at each other, Southern crack, okay, marijuana, things of that nature.

00:05:57
Speaker 6: The police just because they see you on the street, young guys know they would pick you up.

00:06:02
Speaker 3: Shake you down.

00:06:03
Speaker 6: And I was known to frequent that neighborhood.

00:06:06
Speaker 1: Well, as we all know, the crack epidemic ushered in so called tough on crime policies and politicians and legislation and instituted mandatory minimum sentences, funded task forces in the so called high traffic areas, and any means necessary attitude toward removing anyone they suspected of being involved in drug trafficking.

00:06:26
Speaker 4: Every time I investigator speak to anybody about this, they said the same thing. Jonathan Parker was someone who they wanted off the streets by any means. Apparently that meant to them at this time.

00:06:40
Speaker 1: Then, as we've seen, that could mean framing someone for murder. And the first attempt on Jonathan came within January nineteen ninety seven murder of a man named Leroy Lewis.

00:06:48
Speaker 4: Listen to this defendant of Pella. Jonathan Parker was convicted in the US District Court for the Western District of New York of killing Leroy Lewis while engaged in a conspiracy to possess with the tended to distribute crack. On appeal, Parker challenges the sufficiency of the government's evidence. The government produced no direct or physical evidence establishing Parker as the shooter, no eyewitness testimony to the shooting, any statements concerning the circumstances of the shooting. No evidence was introduced as the motive, no murder weapon was found. The government's evidence was entirely circumstantial. It was a statement base upon a statement upon a statement, but nothing to tie Jonathan to the murder other than lay opinion testimony. Specifically, whether a small bulge in Parker's jacket viewed from a distance was a handgun, and hey, he looked a little suspicious after the fact. Basically, Jonathan got convicted and they didn't have shit, so that.

00:07:51
Speaker 1: Conviction was overturned in two thousand and two, but they had already buried Jonathan with two other sentences, only one of which was based in fact, which was a weapons possession charge. And the same officers who were shot in this case, they were the ones who arrested Jonathan and he pleaded guilty.

00:08:08
Speaker 3: Yes, I played guilty to the weapons possessor's charges. You no more than a three and a half to nine sentence. I believe it might have been that morning from an interview with a probation officer to do a probation report to prepare for my centences.

00:08:24
Speaker 1: So Jonathan had this probation officer's business card in his jacket that night, which he wore to a party which was about a five minute walk from the crime scene in this case, but according to both Jonathan and witnesses from the party, he had left his jacket, his hat, and his beeper at the party before leaving.

00:08:40
Speaker 3: I actually I left the resident in a cab with my cousin to my own with the attention of returning to the resident. I never returned to the residents because I was supposed to be meeting up with a young woman. So my cousin left and I came to our I was around the corner from in a cab. When I'm pulling up in a cab.

00:08:58
Speaker 6: They literally are in the neighborhood.

00:09:01
Speaker 3: She got in the cab and we went back to my own.

00:09:04
Speaker 1: By the time he was picking up this young lady around one am, the shooting had already occurred near the corner of Northampton and East Parade now. According to Officer Michael Martinez, at around twelve forty five am, he and his partner, Charles Skip McDougall spotted a suspicious individual who they believed might have stolen a car.

00:09:25
Speaker 5: They say, when they held this person and he simply opened fire on them, hit the one in the foot, and then shot McDougall and killed him.

00:09:37
Speaker 3: Martinez he actually gave the initial description in it. It was a light skinned male approximated five nine of maybe a shade removed from being dart skinned for sure of nowhere near five. I'm five six and a half and.

00:09:54
Speaker 1: Officer Martinez knew what Jonathan looked like from prior arrests, and we can only presume that he would have been in interested in catching his own shooter. Right. And two more witnesses, James Gaines and Event Pryor, agreed this shooter was a light skinned guy about five foot nine, and they added that he wore dark clothing and white sneakers, and they said he had run up East Parade toward Fujuran. So police scoured the area looking for someone meeting that description, as well as witnesses and evidence. And it appears that the narrative about Jonathan may have begun to emerge with the discovery of his jacket, hat and beeper, the ones that he'd left at the party.

00:10:32
Speaker 7: They say they found in a backyard somewhere.

00:10:35
Speaker 3: The district attorney had a witness five said that maybe an hour or two prior to this incident, that I was in a house full of people and then I left out of the house, leaving my jacket in that.

00:10:49
Speaker 6: House and never returned.

00:10:51
Speaker 3: The house was located near the corner of fuge Uran and Fillmore, unless they founded in a backyard on the next street over from Fudoran which is overen well.

00:11:01
Speaker 1: No one has offered information about how these items left the house party, but Jonathan's probation officer's business card was inside the jacket. At this point, it seems the investigation steered away from whoever Officer Martinez, James Gaines, and Yvette Fryar had described and focused in on Jonathan, who had just pled guilty. The weapons charges and the Leroy Lewis charges were still looming.

00:11:26
Speaker 5: I have several cases like that where they say, he's a nasty street kid, let's get him off the streets. We know he didn't kill Skip, but he's a trouble let's get him off the streets.

00:11:40
Speaker 3: I actually remember, ironically, I was sitting in the house with one of my cousins and we were watching the news when they first booke about the incident, and my cousin made it common to the extent of, you know, she felt sorry for whoever they ended up picking up for this because of the climbate of things in Buffalo at the just prior to this, I want to say maybe within a year, so a year and a half half that they had young black males were still being apprehended.

00:12:13
Speaker 1: Palice to call, but if they were going to get Jonathan, they needed a lot more than just finding his belongings nearly a half a mile away from the crime scene. So it was at this time that lead investigator Andre Ortiz approached another man known to frequent the open air drug market.

00:12:30
Speaker 3: Now.

00:12:30
Speaker 1: This guy was named Aaron Yarborough, and he was known to sell random items, and according to subsequent statements, he had told them that he was in the pharmacy on Northampton and Fillmore when he heard the gunshots. But something which we're going to get into later led him to tell a very different story on April tenth.

00:12:51
Speaker 4: This is a statement that he gave to the police at the time, and anytime he refers to Parker, he calls him Face. Well, I was on the corner of Northampton in East per when I had seen Face Now. I asked him if he wanted to buy a CD player. He said yeah, but the price that we talked about wasn't going to fulfill. So I went up East Parade. We seen Junior sitting in a white Chevy Caprice and he agreed to one hundred dollars. So this is a CD player. He paid me the money and then I went down the street towards Northampton and East Parade, where I heard some shots when I had seen face ran past me holding a gun at his side.

00:13:29
Speaker 6: Soon after that, I've seen my picture on the news saying that I was assister.

00:13:35
Speaker 3: So I got in contact with Tarny Paul Hervey and he didn't have much details. It couraged me to turn myself in if I had nothing to high, but I didn't have anything now, so I asked him to come pick me up and take me to turn myself up. I was arrested April eleventh, nineteen ninety seven, in prison ever since.

00:14:13
Speaker 4: At approximately twenty fifteen hours on April eighteen, nineteen ninety seven, Aaron Yarborough stated that himself and Jonathan Parker were outside his uncle's house on Josephine Street when the police raided it. Jonathan Parker pointed to officer McDougall and stated, that's the guy who arrested me for the gun. I'm going to get that motherfucker. So they used Aaron to basically show a history or a motive here. April twenty second, Aaron Yarborough was put into a Buffalo Hilton Hotel, Room two ten. This is a guy who's selling CD players walking down the street now is getting put up in a hotel for who knows how long to make a very easy statement.

00:14:58
Speaker 1: And that's what we'll find out. This was far better treatment than he was originally offered, but a few statements from a guy with substance abuse issues is not going to cut it. So on April twenty eighth, police approached Aaron Lott and his wife Cassandra Salinas, who had an encounter with officers MacDougall and Martinez on the night of April eighth, ten forty five.

00:15:19
Speaker 4: Aaron Lott is sitting in a parking lot with our driver's license while Cassandra's in work. He gets a ticket, the car gets impounded. McDougal and Martinez are the officers on that ticket and on the impound documentation. Cassandra gets out of work at about eleven fifteen. Her and Aaron then make their way to the police precinct. Then they never actually got the car back that night.

00:15:47
Speaker 1: However, it was stated in a report that officer Martinez had recognized Lot and Selinas as they passed each other on Northampton Street moments before the shooting because they were in the same car in which Lot had been ticketed earlier. This is allegedly how they knew to approach Lot for a statement. But as the narrative goes, Aaron and Cassandra, as well as a driver, passed the scene in a Ford Explorer, not a Hyundai Excel, and to top it off, the Ford Explorer had tinted windows. It's only discovered many years later that Aaron Lott was exchanging testimony for leniency in his own charges. You probably saw that coming. Nevertheless, he gave a statement nineteen days after the crime that as they rolled down Northampton, he and Cassandra saw Jonathan crossing the street. He yelled yo to the car as they passed, and they turned around to witness the shooting through the Explorer's back window.

00:16:45
Speaker 5: And the driver of the truck. He was never called. We presume that since the cops had no hold on him, it wasn't facing anything that he wouldn't testify. It might even be a Brady issue. We don't know what he originally told the cops. We just know he never testified.

00:17:04
Speaker 3: All though the l witnesses aged some type of uterior motive, with the exception.

00:17:09
Speaker 5: Of Aaron Lott's wife, she basically agreed with what said. The strayers lined up very well because it was orchestrated.

00:17:21
Speaker 1: With the community and media calling for blood and the context of Jonathan's weapons possession guilty plea and other pending murder case. The district attorney sought the death penalty, and as we often see in capital cases, a ton of circumstantial evidence is produced to try to ensure a win, but without the support of a relatively small amount of consequential direct evidence, the circumstantial evidence tends to lose its meaning. For example, there was James Gaines and Yvette Fryar who echoed Officer Martinez's description and confirmed that the assailant ran in the direction of where Jonathan's belongings were discovered, granting that evidence the scent of validity. And then along came Aaron Yarborough, without the critically important context of how his statement.

00:18:09
Speaker 3: Came to be, He said that just prior to this incident that he was attempted to sell me. I believe you said it was some CDs and I don't even think I had seen him that day.

00:18:23
Speaker 1: Yarborough also said that he saw Jonathan running from the scene with a gun in the direction of where police found his belongings, again granting a sent of validity to that evidence, and then, unbeknownst to the defense, Aaron Lott was trading testimony for a time cut when he parroted what he'd already said in his statement and the grand jury then Cassandra bolstered his credibility with what they claimed to see while being driven down Northampton that same night.

00:18:51
Speaker 6: There was the driver, which I'm still confused as to why he was never called to testify, other than maybe the fact that he wasn't being cooperative like Aaron Yardborough and air a.

00:19:03
Speaker 1: Lot or maybe he didn't actually exist also possible. Then the police officer Michael Martinez testified to the narrative of the shooting, but would not positively I d Jonathan.

00:19:16
Speaker 5: He wasn't sure that it was Parker. Even on the stands. He wouldn't lie and say it was definitely Parker. It could have been Parker. So he's he's one of the not willing to totally pergure himself cops.

00:19:32
Speaker 1: And Martinez was cross examined with his initial description.

00:19:36
Speaker 3: I was positive I was going to get acquitted. I know I have anything to do with it, and how already came into the prison system for my OLB weapon possesses charges. But I was confident I was going to be leaving out of that courtroom to finish my centers and eventually.

00:19:51
Speaker 6: Be home to my family.

00:19:52
Speaker 1: And maybe he would have, but it seems like his attorney, Jim Harrington, didn't want to take that gamble, so in closing, he tried a strategy that was not aimed at acquittal. In fact, the opposite.

00:20:04
Speaker 5: Harrington was a death penalty attorney, and he said so in his affidavit that his job was not so much as to acquit Jonathan, but to keep him alive. So trying to create sympathy or pity from the jury. He said, Jonathan did it, but it was in the spur of the moment. He didn't plan on doing it, which is all. Yes, he never did it at all.

00:20:33
Speaker 3: I made him very weird that I was innocent of this crime. I'm sitting in the courtroom and it was owned by sheer will that I did act a fool At the time. My defense wasn't a defense geared towards guilty innocence. It was geared towards life with death. I've got life without the possibility of groul, which is just death by incarcerations. I've had close to thirty years to think about it. But when you go back to the initial description, you have a police officer who we know are trained observers, who said that the perpetrator in his crime was a lisicin bail five nine. And these are things that are reasonable try or in fact, when you say, okay, you got a young man sitting in the courtroom in front of you who is maybe a shade removed from being darb skinned, but three or four shades removed from being licekined. And again, like I said, I'm five to six maybe five six and a half. Then we go back to Gatina's being shot on the passenger side of the car, but the suspect shooting from the driver side of the car. I don't understand how person gets shot in the ankle. Then you're saying you found a weapon that's who alleged to have been used in this incident, an nine milimeter seventeen clock, which is the exact same weapons that police officers are issued to carry when they all duty.

00:22:18
Speaker 5: The street version is that McDougal didn't want to be dirty anymore. Everybody spoken to says that the cops kill Skip because he wanted to go clean and they were afraid he'd reveal their antics, so they killed them. Allegedly, they took their time getting to the hospital to make sure Skip was dead allegedly, but before Carl.

00:22:45
Speaker 1: Spoke to anyone, Jonathan did his direct appeal, subsequent appeal and federal habeas which took about twelve years to finally all be denied. Twelve long years, during which time the lead investigator on this case, Detective Andrea Ortiz, was himself arrested in connection with his involvement with a local drug trafficking organization headed by an individual named Frankie Johnson.

00:23:07
Speaker 4: Detective or Ties in the Western District of New York took a play on a two thousand and four case. Now, this plea agreement is ten pages. This was the most substantive document that I could find with regards to this case, because everything else I searched for was under seal, and the plea agreement essentially lays out what he pled to fraud and related activity in connection with computers or tees.

00:23:35
Speaker 1: Agreed to plead guilty to accessing a Justice Department criminal database and then sharing that information with this notorious drug kingpin Frankie Johnson. Now who knows what it was used for. I mean, my mind doesn't go to a good place.

00:23:50
Speaker 4: If he's going to utilize his access as a Buffalo police officer and passed that information along to someone who's not a police sawfe officer or someone who may be in the streets, and that was alleged here. There has to be a history there, and there's probably a bunch of other things that are being exchanged as well. It just so happened to be that this is what they caught, or this what was on their radar, or this is what they were able to say was ultimately pasted to someone who shouldn't have gotten this information. And also, in order for the FEDS to take on a case like this, there has to be substantial ties to criminal activity that far exceed this for this to even become an issue in the Fed world. This is a nominal crime that he took a plea to.

00:24:40
Speaker 1: According to his plea deal, he'd either do one year in prison, pay a fine, or both. A sweet deal when you think about it, for his role in this drug organization for which guys like Jonathan may end up in and out of prison for life.

00:24:56
Speaker 4: So whenever this guy was able to really work out, it's seems like it was actually a slap on the wrist. The maximum possible sentences are usually just statutory and don't actually apply.

00:25:08
Speaker 6: I can't honestly speak accurately to what was going on with those officers at the time, but as evidently something was going on because I say, aside from the technive war piece, there was another police officers and detectives. They were also brought up on corruption charges.

00:25:24
Speaker 1: Which begins to grant a center validity to that street version of events that Karl was talking about. And then Aaron Yarborough came forward to shed even more light on the situation.

00:25:36
Speaker 3: Somewhere around twenty twelve, Aaron Yarborough actually ran into a family member of mine and was saying that he had got sick and he was likely to have long to live and he was feeling guilty about what he had done and he just wanted to tell the truth about it.

00:25:53
Speaker 5: Aaron Yarborough, who now has passed away, said that he was at a drug store nearby say anything, but the cops told him exactly what they wanted him to say he saw so.

00:26:06
Speaker 4: Yarborough actually gives a sworn statement whereverybody says that testimony that I then offered was false and totally untrue. I was told what to say that I had seen. He basically says, I did not see Jonathan Parker at or near the scene of the murder. I definitely did not see Jonathan Parker shoot a Buffalo police officer. I had been around the corner store a block away from the shooting when I heard the noise. I looked out to see what was happening. I saw many police cars going by, so I quickly left the area. Later that evening, homicide Detective Andre Ortiz and a bunch of other cops captured me. He actually uses the word captured me.

00:26:54
Speaker 5: Detective Ortiese had threatened him that if he didn't lie and shay that that he saw Jonathan do the shooting, that he would take him out in the cornfields and blow his head off.

00:27:09
Speaker 4: He said that he knew the reputation of Detective Ortz. He was afraid for his life, so he agreed to see whatever they told me to say. At Jonathan Parker's murder triumph, Now that Detective Ortiz is no longer a Buffalo police detective and therefore can no longer kill me for telling the truth. I am now willing to tell the absolute truth.

00:27:32
Speaker 1: By the time Yarbo came clean, Jonathan had connected with Keanty Ricks in prison, who put him in contact with Carl and Stephen, who began reinvestigating the case and recording these affidavits. So they also visited Aaron Lott.

00:27:48
Speaker 5: According to Aaron lott subsequent statement, there was a Ford Explorer that had gone by. According to the witnesses, they were all the way down to the next light on Fillmore when they heard the shots. They didn't see anything.

00:28:05
Speaker 1: Aaron Lott.

00:28:06
Speaker 5: He was facing federal prison time for drugs. The police said, we'll make it go away if you'll say you were a block back and saw this whole thing, which he did.

00:28:18
Speaker 1: But now we get to how they knew to approach Aaron Lott for testimony. Remember, he wasn't in the Hyundai Excel that Officer Martinez had seen him in earlier that night. He was in this Ford Explorer with tinted windows. It appears that Aaron Lott had already been cooperating with the Feds, but strangely that wasn't information that was readily available even if trial counsel wanted to find it or anyone else for that matter.

00:28:45
Speaker 4: I'm looking for Aaron Lott. Why do I not find anything in Aaron Lott? Because I discovered that he's going by his criminal cases Aaron Davis, and I have confirmed with the District Attorney's office that Aaron Davis in this case is Aaron Lott. And specifically, the plea agreement that I received with regards to Aaron Lott pertains to a nineteen ninety five Western District case. But on the plea there is a actual stamp about his plea agreement being in December of nineteen ninety seven. So here's the entry of guilt from sometime in nineteen ninety three and continuing through September ninety four, defending Aaron Davis aka Aaron Lott knowingly, intentionally and willfully agree to assist, Dexter Hennings and others in purchasing, storing, and selling cocaine and cocaine based crack in Buffalo, New York and elsewhere in the Western District forty one grams of cocaine base and one hundred and thirty grams of cocaine are the amounts involved in his relevant conduct. Now they were talking about a mandatory minimum of five.

00:30:07
Speaker 1: It's the perfect time, actually for me to point out the one hundred and one sentencing disparity between crack and powder cocaine. Five grams of crack meant a minimum of five years, fifty grams carried a minimum of ten years. But compared to sentencing for powder cocaine, which was more popular in wealthier and wider circles, it would take five hundred grams of powder cocaine to trigger the very same mandatory five year sentence that someone could get with just five grams of crack. Meanwhile, simple possession of even one hundred and thirty grams of cocaine was just a misdemeanor punishable by up to a year in prison. Now, I'll let you make your own inferences about why this disparity existed. We spoke with Senator Dick Durbin about how he worked to correct that disparity with the bill that he proposed, which was signed into law in twenty ten. All of this fascinating history is on the episode of Righteous Convictions, where I interviewed Dick Durbin. We're going to link to that in the episode description. But back to Aaron Lott. It appears that he had cooperated on this nineteen ninety five case, yet the plea deal was signed in December nineteen ninety seven, and his charges appear to completely ignore the trafficking of one hundred and thirty grams of cocaine and who knows what else, and instead was focused solely on the forty one grams of crack with a minimum sentence of five years.

00:31:29
Speaker 4: Now this talk of community or house confinement, there is this understanding that he is going to get time towards his sentence by not officially going in. And here's what it's based on. Check this out. There is a paragraph entitled cooperation Paragraph eighteen. Defendant has already cooperated and will continue to cooperate with the government by providing complete and truthful information regarding his knowledge of any and all criminal activity, whether undertaken by himself or others. So they sprinkled all this stuff in there, And what do you think he's doing during this time? During this time he is cooperating on Jonathan Parker's case.

00:32:15
Speaker 1: In the next paragraph, it stated that de Feds would give him credit against his sentence for cooperation with state and local authorities as well, and in federal sentence and guidelines they have numerical levels that correspond to time ranges for specific charges. After his first cooperation, he was at level twenty five, with a minimum of sixty to seventy one months on a community confinement, all.

00:32:35
Speaker 4: Right, So they got him at a level twenty five, And essentially it's saying, if you provide additional assistance now we're talking about ninety seven grand jury testimony, we'll knock it down five levels. You know, we'll talk about thirty three to forty one months. But if you provide additional assistance, you get another two levels knocked down. Now you're right, eighteen, which provides for a sentence of twenty seven to thirty three months of incarceration.

00:33:06
Speaker 1: So by cooperating in Jonathan's case, he was able to chip away to level eighteen, meaning just two years in change on community confinement, with the opportunity to chip away even more with further cooperation, and the deal got even sweeter for mister Aaron Lott.

00:33:23
Speaker 4: Moving on paragraph twenty in exchange for defendants flea of guilt and cooperation is set forth, he will not be prosecuted by the Office of the United States Attorney for the Western District for any other federal criminal offenses. I mean, in that world, that is huge. Check this out now, paragraph twenty one. The government will move the court at sentencing provided to guidelines five K one point one. I don't know if you know what a five K one point one is, but it's a downward departure that's submitted in a letter format that basically says you have provided the government substantial assistance. And it essentially is and can be considered as good as a get out of jail free card without question. It is amazing what a five K one letter will do.

00:34:18
Speaker 1: So Aaron Lott was in a position to be a serial testifier, which not only would have been very useful to trial counsel, but alternatively anyone else who Aaron Lott may have cooperated against, falsely or otherwise. Which makes me wonder again about what information Detective Ortiz might have accessed and shared that got the Feds pissed off enough to prosecute him. Either way, Jonathan now had Yarborough lot and by association Cassandra Salinis, this was powerful evidence of innocence, and then Jonathan's case got another boost in twenty eighteen when the Supreme Court ruled in McCoy versus Louisiana, affirming that a defendant has the right to choose their own defense, which for him meant that his attorney violated his rights by conceiving guilt in closing arguments. So Carl added that to a new for forty motion.

00:35:10
Speaker 5: I had four issues. Issue one was based on McCoy. Issue two, McCoy is retroactive because at that point under Montgomery and Welch they had held it to be retroactive. Third was newly discovered evidence, basically Aaron Yacht and Aaron Yarborough's testimony. And the fourth issue actual innocence. I did that because under federal law, a claim of actual innocence cannot be time barred. I had plenty of affidavits from Harrington, from Aaron Lost, from Aaron Yarborough, and from the lead death penalty lawyer in Rochester explaining why Harrington said what he did because his job was not to acquire Jonathan, but to keep him alive. So originally the four forty lead off was McCoy. Unfortunately, the Supreme Court subsequently claimed that McCoy will not apply retroactively. Too many people were getting out, so that issue went out.

00:36:20
Speaker 1: So an amended four to forty was submitted in twenty twenty two based on all this new evidence and the actual illness it's claim.

00:36:27
Speaker 4: I was having status conferences with the court and trying to push for an evidentiary hearing, and I got everybody to agree that a hearing was warranted. Then the assigned assistant district attorney who was on the case, I believe he was fired. He was no longer on the case. A new set of district attorneys came on the case, and they immediately contacted the court and said that the district attorney's office has changed their stance on whether or not an evident sure You're hearing was warranted. I then as for another status conference. At that court appearance, we actually both I mean I addressed the court at least twice. Carl was working with Attorney Goldstein. He addressed the court and the people's position was to essentially attack the credibility of the recantations. And I continued to push for a hearing, and at one point the judge said that he would have a decision in thirty days whether or not we could have an evidentialry hearing. That was at the end of twenty twenty two, so we are now going on thirty days turning into three years. At first, my position was, let's not rock the boat because I could force a decision, but enforcing a decision that's going to land us in appellet world for the next couple of years. I submitted a bunch of different subpoenas I kept pushing this issue that I want people to testify, and I am told that a decision will be issued in the month of October of this year.

00:38:06
Speaker 1: And we understand that they have a massed witnesses that will corroborate the recantations as well as support for the alternate theory, but they can always use more help.

00:38:15
Speaker 3: I'm asking for anybody who as any information in regards to this matter and a murder officer child Skip McDowell to please contact Carl Deviver, Stephen A. Metcalf, anybody who you feel can hear what needs to be her for you to say what needs to be said.

00:38:33
Speaker 1: We're going to link contact information in the episode description. Please go there, check it out and take whatever action you're capable of, and in the meantime we await Judge by NACI's decision on the evidentiary hearing. Let's hope for a good one. Now with that, we'll go to closing arguments, where I think you guys, from the bottom of my heart, especially you Jonathan, for sharing courageously sharing your story. And now I'm going to kick back in my chair with my headphones on and my eyes, my microphone off and just listen to anything else you guys have to say. Steven, you go first and then hand the microphone off to Carl and then Jonathan will take us off into the sunset.

00:39:11
Speaker 4: I mean, I think to summarize this with what we spoke about tonight is if it doesn't fit, it just there's a reason it doesn't fit. Aaron Yarborough is ultimately trying to sell CD players on the street, yet he becomes one of the government's first witnesses. The guy gets thrown into the Hilton. He's living his best life at this point, giving statements to substantiate the investigation throughout the course of this time. Then you have Aaron Lott and Cassandra. Aaron Lott happens to be a player or drug dealer in the streets at this time, has so much to gain from providing information against Jonathan Parker, and in order to do that, he had to rope Cassandra into it, because ultimately Cassandra made them look more credible. And ultimately, you take this mixed bag of various different characters, potentially two of them crackheads, one of them a nice crack dealer, You mix it all up, and you got the witnesses they needed to put the gun in Jonathan Parker's hand. It's just nobody actually looked at it and told the additional story or the other side of the story. The streets have spoken about this, The streets keep speaking about this, and the thirty years that the streets have spoke about that, we're looking to actually tell that real side of that story and seek justice for Jonathan. And I'm confident that all you got to do is give me a hearing and I could blow Jonathan Parker's case out of the water where no appellate division would ever even question it, and it would just be another repeat of Jonathan Parker case with no evidence whatsoever to justify a conviction.

00:40:55
Speaker 5: They know Jonathan was innocent, but they had a dead cop and then use paper screaming for a perpetrator. And they thought that Parker is a nasty street kid. Let's get him off the streets. We know he didn't kill Skip, but he's a trouble let's get him off the streets. I'm glad to say that somebody is finally willing to do something to get an innocent man, a framed man out of jail.

00:41:24
Speaker 6: Well, it's obviously that the evidence in this case shows that I didn't commit this crime. And as I've said, I've professed my innocence from the day I turned myself into the very second where you're hearing this bad cast. So I just asked the justice to be served. We say we have a justice system, that the justice system is supposed to be equal to everyone. This is justice system was not equal to me in these circumstances surrounding this case. So now the time the correct one needs to be corrected, and hopefully the truth will come to the light and I will be set free.

00:42:05
Speaker 1: Thank you for listening to Wrongful Conviction. You can listen to this and all the Lava for Good podcasts one week early and ad free by subscribing to Lava for Good plus on Apple Podcasts. I want to thank our production team Connor Hall and Kathleen Fink, as well as my fellow executive producers Jeff Kempler, Kevin Wartis, and Jeff Kleiber. The music in this production was supplied by three time OSCAR nominated composer Jay Ralph. Be sure to follow us across all social media platforms at Lava for Good and at Wrongful Conviction. You can also follow me on Instagram at It's Jason Flamm. Wrongful Conviction is a production of Lava for Good Podcasts and association with Signal Company Number One. We have worked hard to ensure that all facts reported in this show are accurate. The views and opinions expressed by the individuals featured in this show are their own and do not necessarily reflect those of Lava for Good.