Justice For Julius
A forty-five-year-old white businessman, Paul Howell, was murdered in 1999 in Edmond, Oklahoma. In a city known for its white-flight population, criminal behavior was rare. So when Howell was murdered, the city was scared, shook, and eager to address the case. The way the city went about addressing the case, however, is severely corrupt, racist, and unjust. In August of 1999, then-nineteen-year-old Julius Jones was charged and arrested for the first-degree murder of Howell. He maintained his innocence and presented evidence to prove his wrongful conviction, but in 2002, he was convicted of murder and sentenced to death. Julius Jones is currently on death row for a crime he did not commit. The eyewitness's description of the shooter is ambiguous; even though Jones' co-defendant somewhat fits the description, Jones himself does not. The co-defendant experienced incarceration for fifteen years and now is a free man while Jones is still experiencing incarceration even though he maintains innocence. Throughout his process of being wrongfully convicted, police officers and jurors used racial slurs against Jones. Such hateful acts will not be tolerated. There are currently 3,000 people on death row. People's lives are in the hands of jurors, and for Jones, his life is in the hands of jurors who verbally abused him with racial slurs. Jones is in solitary confinement for twenty-three hours a day; he gets one hour of sunlight and three showers a week. He is treated inhumanly; we need to take action now!!! His appeals are over. He is at the last stage before execution.
ACT NOW
Here's what you can do: sign petitions, watch his documentary, listen to podcasts about him, make calls to government officials, write letters in support of his clemency campaign. All of these actions are on his website along with details of the case. I recommend that you educate yourself through the website's various pages; it goes into details about the legal proceedings and facts that are important to the case. Some of the ways you can be an activist don't take much time, so please act now. Another way to help advocate for his release is through sharing information about his case like I am doing now. Send links to family and friends; engage in conversations with others, and educate them about this case and the implications of wrongful convictions in our severely corrupt criminal justice system. Knowledge is power. Let's make society wealthy in knowledge and spark important activism.
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