In late August, Justin Lamar Jackson — accused of kidnapping, rape and torture — walked out of the Fulton County Jail.
The mistaken release forced Jackson’s terrified victim into protective custody. And it once again highlighted chronic problems with the criminal justice system in Georgia’s most populous county.
Jackson, 30, spent nearly three weeks as a free man before he turned himself back in.
The jail blamed his accidental release on a missing electronic document. The district attorney’s office said the jail misinterpreted the record.
Both agree on one thing: the process for handling inmates is broken. But they remain sharply at odds over how to fix it and prevent similar mistakes from placing the public at risk.
“To describe it in a way that most people and my grandmother would describe it: it’s a bad system,” District Attorney Paul Howard told The Atlanta Journal-Constitution. “It’s too slow, it’s inexact and the thing it does is it creates too many defendants, and the defendants are in jail for too long.”
Credit: Bob Andres
Credit: Bob Andres
While it’s unknown specifically how many mistaken releases have occurred at the jail, Howard said even one is too many.
‘It would have been a real tragedy if this guy had decided to go back and do some harm to this victim,” Howard said of Jackson.
From five charges to nine
On July 28, 2017, Jackson allegedly tortured the mother of one of his kids using a knife, hammer and hot iron, according to an Atlanta police incident report, continuing for hours until she passed out multiple times in a bathtub.
She escaped two days later when Jackson left to go to church, the report said.
He was arrested soon after on five charges: aggravated battery, aggravated assault, false imprisonment, possession of a knife during a felony and terrorist threats.
Over the past two years, prosecutors re-indicted Jackson to include more charges. In December 2017, they added charges of rape and third-degree child cruelty. In July 2019, he was charged with kidnapping and a second count of aggravated battery.
Howard said indictments often need to be amended in cases involving sexual assault, since victims often open up more about sensitive details as they build a rapport with prosecutors and detectives.
In this case, the woman later said Jackson raped her when she was passed out, court records show.
‘Jangled up’ paperwork
Every time a defendant is re-indicted, a new case number is created. Both of Jackson’s re-indictments came before his prior case was closed.
Fulton County sheriff’s Col. Mark Adger said that can leave a suspect’s custody in question. Is a case legitimately over, or is it continuing under a different case number?
“The paperwork was all jangled up and messed up,” Adger said. “It was just confusing.”
Jackson's last re-indictment happened more than a month before his old case number was closed Aug. 29. Adger said his staff received documents to close the case, but the re-indictment was not uploaded correctly within the county's case management system.
Credit: AJC File
Credit: AJC File
As a result, he said the jail had no right to hold Jackson.
“If we’re at fault, we’d admit fault, and it wasn’t our fault,” Adger said.
Howard said the jail likely misinterpreted the online records.
‘It’s supposed to be automated’
Fulton’s $17 million unified case management system was launched in 2013 to simplify communication between the county’s justice system agencies.
Both sides said the other knows who to contact in case of confusion, but both prefer to rely on the system to do its job. Neither party wants to constantly contact the other to double-check the accuracy of online records.
“That’s the reason the county spent $17 million to put it into place … It’s supposed to be automated,” Howard said.
Given the lack of direct communication, the DA’s office didn’t know Jackson was mistakenly released. They learned the news Sept. 18 from his alleged victim, who saw on Facebook that he was back on the street.
"They were supposed to protect me and keep me aware of everything," she told Channel 2 Action News at the time. "Now I've got to look over my shoulder, watch where I go."
Howard’s office obtained new warrants for Jackson’s arrest and placed the woman in protective custody until Jackson turned himself in two days later.
The suspect’s father, Jackie Jackson, drove his son to the Fulton jail from his home in Ohio. He took a different issue with what happened, complaining that his son had been in jail for 761 days without a trial.
"Nobody should spend two years with no progress," he told Channel 2. "You need to get my son in court."
Jackson’s public defender, Suzanne Tevis, provided a statement that said: “The District Attorney’s Office has continued to add charges and send us more purported evidence regarding Mr. Jackson’s case. It is our ethical duty as his attorneys to thoroughly investigate this new information … Mr. Jackson looks forward to a fair hearing in court.”
There still is no trial date.
An overloaded system
While Jackson's case has been in limbo since 2017, other Fulton inmates have been in purgatory much longer. Demario Carman, who is accused of the deadly shooting that killed an Atlanta restaurant owner in 2012, has been in jail for more than seven years while prosecutors pursue the death penalty, Howard said.
Defendants have a right to a speedy trial, but Howard said many purposefully slow down cases, hoping key witnesses die or forget important details, while arresting officers might move away.
Given the backlog of cases and the fact Fulton doesn't have a limit on how long someone can spend in jail without a trial, it's a hole Howard said needs significant change to fix. He mentioned that other jurisdictions, like Wayne County, Mich., require felony cases to be disposed within 301 days.
“If we had (a time limit), it would essentially halve the number of people that are in our Fulton County Jail,” he said.
Credit: Photo via AJC
Credit: Photo via AJC
From 2014 to 2018, the number of new inmates dropped 26%, but the jail system's population only decreased 0.3%, Howard said. The system is currently about 100 inmates short of the county's capacity of 3,048, but there were times during the summer when the jails were overcrowded.
Howard said the court system’s efficiency must be increased, which means more judges, prosecutors and public defenders.
The power to release an inmate
He also advocated for a solution to prevent mistaken releases at the jail — but it’s not one the sheriff’s office agrees with.
The DA’s plan would implement a scoring system on inmates, ranking from zero to 10. Suspects of violent crimes, namely rape and murder, would receive a zero, which the case management system would use to override the jail in the event of an attempt to release that inmate.
If charges are dropped, they’d be scored at a 10, letting the jail release them. Any score in between would depend on bond conditions put in place by the courts.
“It’s not the DA, it’s not the jail, but it’s the court system who would decide whether someone gets released,” Howard said.
Adger said more back-and-forth won’t solve a problem that’s an anomaly to begin with. He said the current system works as it should — when the jail receives the right paperwork.
“We don’t need some sort of point survey to determine whether that someone should get out of jail as has been advocated,” he said. “We just need to do our jobs the way we’re supposed to.”
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