They jailed him for 14 months, then dropped the charge and billed him for the stay
Factory worker David Allen Jones spent 14 months locked in the Clark County jail, charged with a heinous crime — downloading child pornography — before prosecutors finally dropped the charge, acknowledging they couldn’t make a case against him. Afterward, he was left homeless and unemployed, his reputation ruined in his hometown.
Acting on a tip from Lexington police that allegedly linked Jones’ Internet Protocol address to a 39-second child sex video downloaded from the web, the Clark County Sheriff’s Department searched his Winchester apartment in October 2013. But police found no evidence of child porn — not in the apartment or on any of the digital devices they seized, including a cell phone, computer tablet, Xbox, server, modem, printer and DVDs.
Jones waived his right to counsel and fiercely denied having anything to do with child porn. Nothing in his public record suggested such behavior. As others noted long afterward, his WiFi signal could be seen from adjoining apartments and the parking lot, so if his IP was in fact involved with downloading a video, it’s possible someone else could access his router.
Still, based on the original tip, authorities arrested him, jailed him and had him indicted. Bond was set at $15,000 cash. That was far more than he could afford.
Eventually, without evidence to make their case, prosecutors agreed in April 2015 to have the case dismissed.
But as Jones walked free, the Clark County Detention Center handed him a bill for $4,008. State law allows jails to charge inmates booking and housing fees. Not every jail pursues this, but Clark County does, and the jailer said Jones owed the county for his time incarcerated. The jail has gone after those fees ever since.
“I just find the whole thing utterly appalling,” said Greg Belzley, one of Jones’ attorneys.
“It’s bad enough that you’re sitting in jail for 14 months for a crime you did not do. You lose your job, you lose your car, you lose your home, you’re threatened every day by the other inmates because they know you’ve been charged with child pornography. Then, when you’re finally cleared, they tell you that now you owe them money for this awful experience,” Belzley said.
Clark County Sheriff Berl Perdue Jr. and Clark County Jailer Frank Doyle did not return calls seeking comment for this story. In a brief statement, Lexington police said: “As a member of the Internet Crimes Against Children Task Force, it is common for our detectives to share information about potential criminal activity with the appropriate agency for further investigation and follow-up.”
Jones filed lawsuits against Clark County officials seeking damages from his arrest and detention as well as fighting the jail fees. The experience has left him embittered, he said.
“I sure as heck don’t trust the law no more,” Jones said in a 2018 deposition. “I mean, I’m always going to have a cloud of suspicion over my head because people tend to believe the law over an individual, you know.” (Jones’ lawyer declined to make him available for an interview with the Herald-Leader, citing his involvement in the pending litigation.)
But the courts have rejected his claims. While expressing sympathy, judges found that Jones has no legal recourse over how he was treated. The law-enforcement officials enjoy immunity as public employees, making it difficult to sue them, and Jones has no proof that he was targeted maliciously, the judges said.
“The Constitution does not guarantee that only the guilty will be arrested,” U.S. District Judge Robert Wier wrote a year ago, dismissing Jones’ malicious prosecution suit against Clark County officials.
“The court shares regret over any day unnecessarily spent by a person in custody. Here, the pre-trial wheels — an apparatus involving not only law enforcement but also the lawyers for both sides and the state court — turned slowly. Jones has reason to feel bruised by the ultimate course of the case,” Wier wrote.
No evidence, no problem
On Oct. 11, 2013, according to a police report, Lexington police Detective David Flannery visited the online Ares peer-to-peer file sharing network and downloaded an explicit video showing a young girl being raped by a man.
A search warrant to AT&T yielded the information that the video also allegedly had been downloaded at an IP address registered to a David Jones where he lived in an apartment complex on U.S. 60 in Winchester. Jones, a divorced father of one teenage son, commuted two hours daily to his job as a welder at Hitachi Automotive Systems in Berea. At age 43, he had no public record of causing trouble.
Winchester is outside of Flannery’s jurisdiction, so he passed the tip along to Clark County Sheriff’s Deputy Lee Murray. Murray, in turn, prepared a search warrant for Jones’ home.
Two weeks later, Murray and four other deputies came knocking in the predawn darkness. Murray wore his heavy bulletproof vest.
“I opened the door, and they rushed in and put me in handcuffs and made me squat on the floor,” Jones recounted during his 2018 deposition. “They showed me a piece of paper. They told me it was a search warrant. They wouldn’t even tell me why they was there until after I was cuffed and on the floor.”
The police searched the place — no evidence of child porn — and then seized all of Jones’ digital devices, plus a handful of DVDs they found, for forensic examination later by Lexington police. At the sheriff’s department, Jones waived his right to speak with a lawyer and agreed to be questioned. He vehemently denied having any involvement with child porn.
“He stated that he didn’t know what we were talking about, that he didn’t have no idea about any kind of video,” Murray later said in his own deposition.
Murray charged Jones with promoting a minor under the age of 16 in a sexual performance, a Class B felony punishable by up to 20 years in prison.
Jones went to jail in lieu of $15,000 cash bond. Two months later, in December, prosecutors secured an indictment against him from the grand jury. There hadn’t been an examination yet of his digital devices, but a lack of evidence that he committed the crime was no reason to wait on an indictment, prosecutors said. The IP address established probable cause, they said.
“All the forensic analysis, whether it’s computers or drugs or DNA and all those things, they always lag,” Assistant Commonwealth’s Attorney Charles Johnson said in a deposition later. “I mean, if you waited each time — when we establish probable cause and we go forward, then these things, as they come in, they’re added to the case.”
One month later, in January 2014, the examination results came back from Lexington police. They were negative.
“Lexington Metro did not recover the the downloaded child pornography from any device seized from Jones’ home,” the report said.
It didn’t matter. Jones would stay in jail for the rest of the year. And unbeknownst to him, the jailer was running a tab.
‘This was very sloppy’
As the months passed in 2014, Jones’ life fell apart because of his prolonged incarceration.
Jones’ only child graduated from high school in Winchester. He wasn’t there to see it. The explanation why humiliated his family. He lost his job because he wasn’t coming to work, and he lost his home and 2009 Kia Optima because he wasn’t paying rent or making car payments. He fell behind on child support, credit card and student loan payments, wrecking his credit history.
Inside the 156-bed Clark County Detention Center, everyone seemed to know the charge Jones faced. People accused of sexually abusing children are very unpopular behind bars. Other inmates threatened him, although he managed to avoid getting stomped.
“Fear in jail,” Jones said in his deposition, “Not knowing if somebody’s going to beat the shit out of me. Because when we go to visitations, we’re all thrown in one room together. The threats that you have to put up with, the names you have to be called.”
The criminal case dragged on interminably. A trial date was set for April, then delayed until June, then delayed until October, then delayed until February 2015.
At some point during this slog, Jones was appointed a new public defender: Valetta Browne, who runs the Richmond office of the Kentucky Department of Public Advocacy.
Browne found the $5,154 necessary to hire her own forensic expert to conduct another exam of Jones’ assorted digital devices. That expert’s conclusion in November was a second exoneration: Jones hung out on Facebook, watched music videos and banked online, but there was no evidence that any of his devices were used to view child porn.
What’s more, said the expert, it wasn’t clear how secure Jones’ WiFi signal had been.
“Nowhere in the discovery documents I have received does it mention law enforcement determining the type of security used on the defendant’s wireless network,” forensic expert Lars Daniel wrote in his report. “If a wireless network is unsecured, anyone within the broadcast range can connect. If it is secured, depending on the security type, the wireless network can be compromised. Free tools and guides are readily available on the Internet for performing such an action.”
“When push came to shove, they didn’t have the goods,” Browne said in a recent interview. “This was very sloppy.”
Armed with the new report, Browne finally convinced a judge on Dec. 15, 2014, to reduce Jones’ bond from $15,000 to $2,500. A friend of his paid it the next day, setting him free. He had to move in with other friends in the community since his own apartment was lost.
It took four more months — until April 2, 2015 — for prosecutors to agree to drop the charge against him. Even then, they dismissed the case “without prejudice,” not “with prejudice.” In legal terms, that raised the ominous possibility of their refiling the charge one day.
In a recent interview, Johnson, the prosecutor, said the defense team made a credible enough argument that someone else around the apartment complex could have accessed Jones’ wireless network. Johnson could not explain the lengthy delay in resolving the case.
“Why it took so long, I do not know,” Johnson said.
Not guilty, still billed
The Clark County jail had a parting gift for Jones — a bill for $4,008 to cover his stay behind bars.
Under a 2000 state law, sentencing judges can order inmates to reimburse jails for the cost of their confinement, including a one-time booking fee and a housing fee not to exceed $50 per day.
Over a recent five-year period, Kentucky jails reported billing nearly $20.9 million in booking and housing fees from inmates. Only half of the roughly 80 local jails appeared to charge those fees with enthusiasm, reporting sums between $50,000 and $300,000, while some jails did not claim any inmate fees. So whether an inmate is billed depends on where he happens to be incarcerated.
The Clark County jail does charge fees, with mixed success. Financial records provided to the Herald-Leader show that over the last two years the jail has billed inmates $107,360 for booking and housing fees while only managing to collect $12,374. Neither the jailer nor the county treasurer returned calls seeking comment on how Clark County pursues fee collections, especially from inmates who are poor.
Jones was outraged by the fees. Among his complaints when he sued to get the fees dismissed: State law says that only sentencing judges can order inmate fees assessed. He was never convicted, much less sentenced by a judge.
“This was the first case presented to the courts in which someone had all charges against them dropped and yet they were still assessed a bill for their stay in the jail,” said Belzley, one of Jones’ lawyers. “The reason is — ta-da! — the presumption of innocence. Unless you are convicted of a crime or you plead guilty to a crime, you are not supposed to be punished in this country.”
But the courts have sided with the jail. In the most recent opinion, handed down Feb. 14, the Kentucky Court of Appeals said it was proper for jails to charge inmates for their stay even when charges are dismissed. This drew a stinging dissent from Court of Appeals Judge Sara Walter Combs of Stanton.
“The ramifications are numerous and ponderous. A person unjustly jailed, upon his release, can look forward to becoming an instant debtor through no fault of his own,” Combs wrote.
“Clark County can never reimburse Jones for the lost months of his life during which he was deprived of his liberty — truly, a non-compensable damage,” she wrote. “Absent a judicial decree, it should not be permitted to add to his damage the debt for the time unjustly spent in its jail.”
Belzley said Jones will ask the Kentucky Supreme Court to review the inmate fee case.
In the meantime, Jones still lives in Central Kentucky, but he doesn’t go into Winchester anymore. Too many people in his hometown told him they heard about the child porn charge. Even after the case was dismissed, they suspected he wasn’t really innocent, he just somehow managed to beat the rap, Jones said in his deposition.
“My reputation, it’s shot. I mean, I’ve got people that I’ve known for years won’t have anything to do with me anymore because they believe the law,” Jones said.
He also stays offline.
“I do not have Internet no more because I’m afraid this will happen again to me,” he said. “I don’t own a computer because I’m scared one day that I might be locked up again.”
