The death sentences of each of the three men were commuted to life imprisonment after an appeals court ruled the jury had received incorrect instructions in their cases.
[6] Jackson and Wiley Bridgeman were ultimately released on November 21, 2014 after the key witness in their jury trial recanted his testimony during a hearing in Cuyahoga County Common Pleas Court.
[1] All three men received several million dollars in settlements from the state in 2015 and 2016 as compensation for their imprisonment and lost wages due to the wrongful convictions.
On May 19, 1975, businessman Harold Franks was killed outside a small grocery store on the city's East Side, where he delivered money orders.
Authorities built their case against Ricky, Wiley, and Ronnie, who lived in the neighborhood, based on the testimony of then 12-year-old Eddie Vernon, who claimed to have witnessed them commit the crime.
[7] Karen Smith, a neighborhood teenage girl, had seen two young black men outside the store before the incident, but testified at trial that she did not know them.
)[2] Ronnie had gone to trade school as a machinist, but was working at another job; his older brother Wiley had entered the Marines but received an honorable discharge for health reasons.
He said he was not close enough to see the murder, as the school bus he rode with other children was a block away from the crime scene, the Fairmount Cut-Rate on Fairhill Road (now Stokes Boulevard) in Cleveland.
[7] The Ohio Innocence Project has handled appeals for the three men and represented them in seeking compensation for the decades they spent in jail due to the wrongful convictions.
[1] After his release, Jackson was awarded $1 million dollars in 2015 in compensation by the state of Ohio for his decades in prison due to the wrongful conviction.
[12] In April 2019, Wiley Bridgeman was charged with vehicular homicide in connection with a crash which took the life of a construction worker in University Heights, Ohio.