News from Ohio – Elwood Jones Exonerated

Elwood Jones was convicted in 1996 for the 1994 beating death of 67-year-old Rhoda Nathan in a Blue Ash, Ohio hotel and spent more than 25 years on death row before new evidence and procedural concerns upended his case. Prosecutors failed to turn over thousands of pages of possibly exculpatory evidence, and later modern testing and review raised serious questions about whether Jones could have been the perpetrator. A judge granted him a new trial in 2022, and on December 12, 2025, Hamilton County prosecutors formally dismissed the charges, acknowledging there is insufficient evidence to support his conviction. Jones is now the 12th person exonerated from Ohio’s death row, underscoring not only the personal tragedy of his lost decades but also deep flaws in our system. AP News

This painful outcome is not an isolated mistake — it’s a glaring example of how our criminal justice system too often prioritizes conviction over truth, punishment over justice, and retribution over careful, fair process. Instead of safeguarding justice, the current system can devastate innocent lives and leave real victims without answers.

Justice demands that we fully fund conviction integrity units, strengthen legal obligations for evidence disclosure, and move toward abolishing the death penalty — a system that, as this case shows, can irrevocably harm the innocent.

Join the call for reform, contact your legislators, support criminal justice advocacy organizations, and help ensure that no one else suffers the injustice that Elwood Jones endured.