New Los Angeles DA unit dedicated to overturning wrongful convictions releases first prisoner
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Raymond Lee Jennings vowed that God would view him as an innocent man.
“This is one sin that I will not be judged for,” he told the court at his 2010 sentencing. “I’m at peace in my life and I laugh and I smile because I hold no remorse.”
But a jury had already convicted him of the 2000 murder of Michelle O’Keefe. The teenager was shot to death inside her blue Mustang in a Palmdale parking lot in a case that went unsolved for several years and drew national attention.
After a judge sentenced Jennings to 40 years to life in prison for second-degree murder, the former Army National Guardsman and Iraq war veteran filed an appeal, but lost. California’s Supreme Court then refused to review the case, and he seemed out of legal challenges.
But in an astounding reversal last week, Los Angeles County prosecutors asked for Jennings’ immediate release from custody, saying they’d discovered new evidence that not only cast doubt on his guilt, but seemed to implicate another person. It marked the first big case handled by the district attorney’s office’s new unit dedicated to overturning wrongful convictions.
After a hearing Thursday when a judge ordered Jennings’ release, his attorney, Jeffrey Ehrlich praised the development, but condemned the “cascade of errors” in the investigation that initially led to his client’s arrest and conviction.
“Ray Jennings is not a murderer,” Ehrlich said. “He was a witness to an awful, senseless, brutal crime.”
The case, which is laid out in court documents, traces back to a winter night in 2000.