Six life sentences for Jones
By John Joyce
Published in News on July 21, 2015 1:46 PM
Henry Calvin Jones, 35, who was convicted Friday of second-degree murder in the 2010 shooting death of Charles Ray Morgan III and other related charges, was sentenced in Wayne County Superior Court on Monday.
Jones will serve six life sentences plus an additional 19 months for possession of a firearm by a convicted felon.
Assistant District Attorney Curtis Stackhouse, who served as co-counsel to veteran Assistant District Attorney Davis Weddle during the prosecution of Jones' case, said he believes the state did its job.
"I think we did well. With shootings in certain areas of this city, there is this code of silence that is hard to break," Stackhouse said.
The state broke that silence by turning one suspect against another.
Montrel O'Neal, 18 at the time of the murder, agreed last October to a plea agreement that changed the tide for the state in a case that was by then four years old.
"For this case, to get two convictions on two co-defendants for murder, we did fairly well," Stackhouse said.
The murder took place April 17, 2010, in the parking lot of what was then called the Courtyard Apartments, now known as Day Circle.
Four men and four women who had been drinking and doing drugs late into the night April 16, planned to rob two men the women met at a local night club, according to O'Neal's testimony.
On the way to commit the robbery, the four men ran into Jones and he invited himself along.
The robbery quickly derailed when one of the perpetrators thought he saw Morgan, who was sitting in his car, reach for something.
Gunfire erupted.
Morgan and a passenger -- his best friend, Brian McLaurin -- were both shot several times.
McLaurin survived but endured eight wounds from four bullets followed by several months of rehabilitation. Morgan died at the scene.
Stackhouse said early on in the investigation that the state only had enough probable cause to charge two men, O'Neal and Jones.
None of the others implicated in the crime incriminated themselves during interviews, but each pointed the finger at O'Neal and Jones, he said.
"We knew that they were involved in the robbery/murder. We just didn't know the details," Stackhouse said.
For the state to learn the details, one of the perpetrators would have to talk. O'Neal was 18 at the time and had no prior convictions, he said.
He said Jones was a violent felon by the time he was 29, which Stackhouse called "both remarkable and outrageous."
"Naturally we chose O'Neal to make a deal with for second-degree murder to testify truthfully against Jones," he said.
Prosecutors were shocked that O'Neal was willing to admit that he fired the fatal shot, Stackhouse said.
"But that made him believable," he added.
Jurors took a little more than four hours to convict Jones, and asked halfway through their deliberations why the other suspects were never charged. They also asked if Jones had ever been offered a deal. The presiding judge instructed the jury to decide the case based on the facts presented and ordered them back to the jury room, but the question signaled to the state that the jury was leaning toward conviction.
"When they asked those questions, we thought that was a good thing. It meant they'd moved on from guilt to equity," Stackhouse said.
Jones had in fact been offered a plea agreement that would have sent him to prison for 26 years on a conviction of second-degree murder but he turned it down.
Instead, the jury found sufficient criteria following his conviction Friday to classify Jones a violent habitual felon, resulting in his receiving a life sentence for each charge he had been convicted of, plus a minimum of 19 months for possessing a firearm as a convicted felon.
In return for his cooperation, O'Neal will be sentenced in Wayne County Superior Court today to seven years and 10 months in prison on a conviction of second-degree murder. With credit for time served, he could be free in two years.
Stackhouse said the light sentence nags at him a bit, but noted that the state did what it felt was necessary to convict both men.
"Of course, he deserves life as well, but without him testifying -- there is a chance he would have been found not guilty -- and no other co-defendant would have been held accountable," Stackhouse said.