After years in prison when almost everyone knew she was innocent she is finally going to be paroled.
It still makes me so angry!!!!
She will be released on June 13, 2005.
Let us all have her in our thoughts and wish her well. She deserves much more!

She insisted she was innocent, and the case against her was weak. But she faced a stark choice: If she rejected the offer of a guilty plea, she took a risk going to trial, possibly being found guilty and being sentenced to a far harsher prison term that would serve as a lesson to future defendants facing a plea choice.


1973, 23-year-old Kelly Jarrett, a North Carolina resident, drove to Utica, New York with a friend, Billy Ronald Kelly, for a summer-long vacation. It was only when the police showed up at her door three years later, Jarrett says, that she learned that during their New York stay, her friend had robbed a gas station in a small town near Utica and had brutally murdered the gas station attendant, Paul David Hatch, a 17-year-old star athlete and high school graduate.

Kelly's fingerprints were found at the crime scene and the evidence against him was massive. But the evidence against Jarrett was weak. All it amounted to was the statement of an elderly witness who said he saw a car at the time of the crime with someone inside. He didn't know, however, whether the person was a man or a woman.

Jarrett was offered a plea of five to 15 years if she would plead guilty to just the robbery, not the murder. In those days, a plea of five to 15 years meant that absent any serious misbehavior, a person likely would be paroled at five years.

Jarrett told her attorney she couldn't plead guilty to a robbery she didn't commit. She went to trial -- a joint trial with Kelly -- claiming that she had nothing to do with either the robbery or the murder. As she told FRONTLINE, "I believed in the American system of justice. I really believed that you just tell the truth and the judge and jury will hear you and nothing will happen to you."

Jarrett was wrong. In March 1977 the jury found Jarrett and Kelly guilty of two counts of murder and two counts of robbery. They were sentenced to 25 years to life in prison.

Ten years passed. Then suddenly, in 1986, Kelly Jarrett got another chance at freedom. Claudia Angelos, a young law professor at New York University, was running a law clinic in which some of her students went to the Bedford Hills Correctional Facility to teach inmates about the law. Bedford Hills' superintendent pointed out Jarrett's case, saying he thought that she was innocent. Angelos became Jarrett's attorney and one of her law students, Abbe Smith (http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/plea/interviews/smith.html), helped work on the case.

Angelos filed a writ of habeas corpus challenging the validity of the eyewitness identification by the elderly man. To her surprise and delight, the habeas was granted and the court said Jarrett was to be released or retried.

But there was a hitch. Angelos knew the state was going to appeal and the circuit court could very likely uphold that appeal. In the meantime, Jarret was offered a plea -- plead guilty to the robbery and the murder and she essentially would get time served and would have her freedom.

"She asked me what I would do," Claudia Angelos told FRONTLINE. "I told her I would take it. She asked, 'What if I don't?' And I said, 'I'll fight for you … we'll do our best, but we might lose.'"

Jarrett decided not to take the plea. "It's just morally wrong to say you did something you know in your heart you didn't do. I couldn't live with myself if I did that. I saw the pictures of the young man and … for them to want me to say that I did something so horrible just to get out of prison, I just couldn't do it."

"She's a religious woman," says Angelos. "God wouldn't let her do it, it would be wrong, it would be lying and [she said] that she would rather stay where she was than commit fraud just to get out. And I said I accepted her decision and then I left."

After Jarrett refused the plea offer, the state won the appeal and she has remained in prison to serve the rest of her sentence, which may be the rest of her life.

Since 1994 Abbe Smith, the law student who had worked on the habeas with Claudia Angelos, has been Jarrett's attorney. Smith says she would have strongly pressured Jarrett to take the appeal. "Most of us don't become criminal defense lawyers because we want to make innocent people plead guilty. But the system stinks and here's somebody who had been locked up for 10 years in a maximum security prison and everybody knew that the court of appeals was going to reverse. There is this one moment, this one opportunity to free her and I would have done everything within my power to get her to plead guilty."


In 2003, after 26 years in prison, Jarrett got a hearing in front of the clemency board. The clemency was not granted. There was no explanation. Only two clemencies were granted that year by Governor Pataki; one went to the satirist Lenny Bruce who died 37 years before.

The first parole hearing for Kelly Jarrett will take place in 2005. But her dilemma may very well follow her. Parole boards expect admission of wrongdoing and expression of remorse. Locked up for almost 30 years for claiming that she is innocent, it would be

Update:

At her first parole hearing in the spring of 2005, Jarrett was granted parole. She will be released on June 13, 2005.


LINKS


FRONTLINE's interview with Abbe Smith, (http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/plea/interviews/smith.html) Jarrett's lawyer

If you want to see just one example of why I am so angry take a look at the Frontline piece on "The Plea," The web address is

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/plea/view/

It comes up in 6 parts and the entire program last 90 minutes.

For example, in chapter 2 you will understand why I say our penal/"justice" system is our (USA) 21st century equivalent of the segregation in the 80s and 90s 0---only its worse because the racism is hidden from most people. The other chapters are even worse...although it is all awful. I don't think you will be able to watch it without a fast connection.

Frontline's show on Plea Agreements This link was sent by Nora with November Coalition. It was on Frontline last night. Very good stuff. Talks about people being basically forced into taking the plea by threatening to give stiffer sentence, etc. People who refused the plea because they were convinced the jury would find them innocent, they were convicted & faced harsher sentences.....

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/front...lea/interviews/ (http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/plea/interviews/)
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FRONTLINE Producer Credited With Freeing 13th Inmate

Parole Board Watches "The Plea" and Frees Convicted Murderer Patsy Kelly Jarrett

BOSTON, MA -- (MARKET WIRE) -- 06/13/2005 -- After serving twenty-eight years for a crime she steadfastly denies she committed, convicted murderer Patsy Kelly Jarrett will walk free from New York's Bedford Hills Prison on Monday, June 13, due in large part to the illuminating investigation of FRONTLINE producer Ofra Bikel. Jarrett is the second person profiled in the 2004 documentary "The Plea" to be released, and the thirteenth person profiled by Bikel in a FRONTLINE film to gain freedom since 1991.

Jarrett was accused along with a male friend of the 1973 murder of seventeen-year-old Paul David Hatch during an armed robbery of a gas station in Sherrill, New York, a small town outside of Utica. While the evidence against her co-defendant was strong, there was little to link Jarrett to the crime.

The case, like the others reported in "The Plea," exposed the limitations of a criminal justice system that relies on plea bargains to determine the outcome of 95 percent of all of its cases. Jarrett was twice offered the chance for a reduced sentence in exchange for a guilty plea: once during her initial trial in 1977, when prosecutors offered to drop the charge to robbery with a sentence of five-to-fifteen years; then again twelve years later when the state offered to reduce her sentence to time already served and release her. In both instances, Jarrett refused to admit her guilt.

"It's just morally wrong to say you did something you know in your heart you didn't do," Jarrett told FRONTLINE in the 2004 documentary. "I might have walked free physically, but in my spirit and in my soul, I would have had to have lived with that the rest of my life. And I couldn't live with me like that."

During a March 2005 review of the case, the members of the New York Parole Board watched Bikel's account of Jarrett's story. According to Jarrett's attorney, Georgetown professor Abbe Smith, "Prison officials said there is no doubt the film had a positive affect on the way the board approached Kelly's case and in their favorable decision."

Jarrett is just one of a long list of inmates freed as a result of Bikel's work. In addition to Charles Gampero, Jr., who was released in November 2004 after the parole board watched his story in "The Plea," Bikel is credited with the exoneration of all seven defendants in the Little Rascals Day Care sexual abuse trial profiled in her "Innocence Lost" trilogy (1991, 1993, 1997); three longtime inmates, some on death row, who finally won the right to DNA testing ten months after being profiled in "The Case for Innocence" (2000); and Terence Garner, a twenty-one-year-old inmate serving a 34- to 43-year-sentence for an armed robbery and shooting he insisted he did not commit in "An Ordinary Crime" (2002).

The recipient of nearly every broadcast journalism award -- including Emmy Awards, duPont-Columbia Silver Batons, and a duPont-Columbia Gold Baton -- as well as the Champion of Justice Award from the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers, Bikel is most gratified when her work produces these kinds of results.

"On my walls I have quite a few awards hanging, but the ones I really cherish are a few which say something like, 'Thank you for bringing my story to the world. Without your efforts I would not have gained my freedom,'" says Bikel.

For more on Jarrett's case or to watch full-length streaming video of more than fifty FRONTLINE films including Bikel's "The Plea" (2004), "Burden of Innocence" (2003), and "An Ordinary Crime" (2002) visit http://www.pbs.org/frontline/.