Arkansas Executes Jack Jones, First of Two Men Put to Death in One Night
He raped and murdered Mary Phillips in Bald Knob in 1995 and left her 11-year-old daughter for dead. His last words were for her.
Published
Three media witnesses were led into the viewing room at the Cummins Unit at 7:03 p.m. on Monday, April 24, 2017. Jack Harold Jones Jr., 52, lay strapped to the gurney with his arms extended, and for about two minutes he talked. He was calm, the Associated Press reporter Andrew DeMillo said afterward, rambling and repeating himself at times. Most of what he said was for one person: the girl he had tried to kill 22 years earlier. "I can't believe I did something to her," he said. "I hope over time you could learn who I really am and I am not a monster. There was a reason why those things happened that day. I am so sorry Lacey, try to understand I love you like my child."
The injection began at 7:06. Jones was pronounced dead at 7:20, 14 minutes later, and the witnesses saw no apparent complications. Earlier that day the Arkansas Supreme Court, the federal appeals court in St. Louis and, shortly after 6 p.m., the U.S. Supreme Court had all refused to stop it. His lawyers had argued that his diabetes and weight could make the lethal injection cruel and unusual, and that the Arkansas Supreme Court had wrongly called a conflict on his jury's sentencing forms a harmless error. Justice Sonia Sotomayor dissented.
The crime was in Bald Knob, on the afternoon of June 6, 1995. Mary Phillips, 34, a mother of three, worked as the bookkeeper at Automated Tax and Accounting Service, and her 17-year-old daughter, Darla, had dropped off her sister Lacy, 11, so their mother could take her to a 3 p.m. dentist appointment. Before they could leave, a man who had come in earlier that day to borrow some books came back, said he was sorry but he was going to have to rob them, and emptied the register. He tied Lacy to a chair in a bathroom off the break room. When she begged him not to hurt her mother, he told her he was going to hurt her instead, choked her until she passed out and struck her at least eight times in the head with the barrel of a BB gun, fracturing her skull. Mary Phillips was raped and strangled with the cord of a coffee pot. Lacy woke as police officers, who had taken her for dead, were photographing her.
Her description of the man, with a teardrop tattoo on his face, led an Arkansas State Police investigator to Jones's door. He confessed, saying he had wanted revenge on the police because his wife had been raped and they had done nothing about it. He was sentenced to death for capital murder, to life for the rape and to 30 years for the attempted capital murder of Lacy, and the Arkansas Supreme Court affirmed all three in June 1997.
He was the first of two men put to death that night. Gov. Asa Hutchinson had scheduled eight executions over 11 days before the state's supply of midazolam, the sedative in its lethal injection protocol, expired at the end of the month, and courts had already stopped four of them. Minutes after Jones died, lawyers for Marcel Williams, due to die at 8:15, told a federal judge that infirmary staff had tried for 45 minutes to place a central line in Jones's neck and that he had been seen moving his lips and gulping for air. Judge Kristine Baker briefly stayed the second execution. The state called the claims inaccurate and "utterly baseless," saying Jones had asked for two IV lines and the execution had gone ahead with two. The stay was lifted before 9:30, and Williams was pronounced dead at 10:33 p.m., in the first double execution in the United States since 2000.
"A governor never asks for this responsibility, but I accept it as part of the solemn pledge I made to uphold the law," Hutchinson said, adding that he hoped Jones's death would bring closure to the Phillips family. Attorney General Leslie Rutledge said that Mary Phillips's daughters, Lacey and Darla, had seen justice for "the brutal rape and murder of their mother," and that the family had waited far too long.
What this story covers. The execution, its timetable, Jones's last statement, the witnesses' accounts, the court rulings of that day, the dispute over his IV line and the stay of Marcel Williams's execution, and the Hutchinson and Rutledge statements come from the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette's live coverage from the Cummins Unit on April 24, 2017, written with the Associated Press. The account of the crime, Jones's confession and his sentences comes from the Arkansas Supreme Court's opinion in Jones v. State, decided June 16, 1997. The court record spells Mary Phillips's daughter's name Lacy; news reports and Jones's own statement spell it Lacey, and her married surname is given differently in different reports, so it is left out here.
Sources
- LATEST: Arkansas executions April 24, 2017 coverage, Arkansas Democrat-Gazette
- Jones v. State, No. CR 96-541, Arkansas Supreme Court (via FindLaw)