Inmate freed from prison after 17 years as lookalike found

A man who was jailed for 17 years for a crime he insisted he never committed has been freed after his doppelganger was discovered.

Richard Jones was charged with aggravated burglary in 1999 and as a result had not seen one of his daughters since he was convicted when she was just a baby.

On his release from prison on Thursday, his daughter met him properly for the first time, and Mr Jones also met his granddaughter.

In 2015, Mr Jones learnt from other inmates at Lansing Correctional Facility where he was serving his sentence that there was a man there who looked just like him, and had the similar name of Ricky.

Mr Jones contacted lawyers at the Midwest Innocence Project and the Project for Innocence at the University of Kansas Law School.

They tracked down Ricky Amos, the lookalike who at the time of the crime lived at the Kansas City address where two men said they had picked "Rick" up from and driven him to the supermarket car park where the attempted bag-snatch and mobile phone robbery took place.

Not only this, but Amos was a similar height and weight to Mr Jones, and was born in 1977, the year after he was.

Amos has not been charged with the robbery and denies any involvement.

He is currently serving a prison sentence after being convicted in April of failing to register as a sex offender related to a 2003 sexual battery charge.

Amos also has robbery, drug possession, and sexual assault charges amongst others.

Alice Craig, a lawyer with the University of Kansas Innocence Project, helped work to release Jones for the past two years.

She told NBC News the original conviction had been a perfect storm of mistakes, ranging from poor detective work to potential racial bias.

"When we pulled up the photos we were shocked," said Ms Craig.

"We actually pulled it up in the middle of the law clinic class, with all the interns. Everyone was just floored.

"Either you’re going to think they’re the same person, or you’re going to say ‘these guys look so much alike'."

In addition, the entire case rested on eyewitness testimony. There was no other evidence linking Mr Jones to the crime, and he did not know the two other men in the car.

However, Jones did have a criminal record of his own, having been sentenced in 1994 for a string of charges related to theft and the sale of steroids.

When the robbery victim was shown an image of Mr Jones following the theft she "relied mostly on skin tone", Johnson County Judge Kevin Moriarty said.

Following Wednesday's court decision, Judge Moriarty added that: "No reasonable juror would have convicted [Jones] in the light of the new evidence," while witnesses said they could barely tell the difference between the pair and no longer thought Mr Jones was guilty.

Even Mr Jones himself admitted the likeness between himself and Amos: "When I saw that picture, it just made sense to me," he said of his conviction.

In Kansas there is no law that stipulates compensation for people who have had their convictions overturned, but an online fundraising page for Mr Jones has been launched and raised more than £9,700 already.