Free-Jason.com is dedicated to seeking justice for - and the release of
Jeremy Jason Mann.
Jeremy "Jason" Mann was born with cognitive and learning disabilities from brain damage due to oxygen deprivation suffered in utero. In 1991, while still a junior in high school, Jeremy Jason Mann was convicted of kidnapping and attempted murder. He was sentenced to life without the possibility of parole plus 25 years.
On the last day of school that year, Jason was coming back from his work program to the high school to pick up his younger brother, when he received a traffic ticket. Later that night he was pulled from his bed and arrested simply because he'd been driving a brown truck. A 7 year-old girl had reported that she had been abducted at the exact same time Jason was getting his ticket. Though no other details of the crime match Jason (other than the truck being brown) - Jason is arrested anyway and a "confession" is coerced from him in the middle of the night. With unabashed deliberateness, the police manipulate every detail of the case to fit their 5-minute investigation. Even with the obvious manipulation of the interrogation video tapes, the girls identification and the "evidence" - Jason is quickly convicted in a complete farce of a bench trial. From the media to the witness, police, prosecution, defense and the judge - this entire case is so unbelievable that when you throw in Jason's mother and the post-conviction lawyer she hires later - it's down-right incredulous. Every right provided someone in this process was violated - and no one cared enough to look twice.
In the end - Jason never saw freedom again after that night, he's been in prison 34 years now. - And the little girl? She went to school the next day..
The value of life, liberty and freedom we hold dear for ourselves and our family is worthless unless that same value is ensured equally for every individual among us, from the most powerful to the least, no matter the color of their skin or the nature of their beliefs. Before we an separate the rights given to "law-abiding" citizens from those who don't abide - we must ensure those laws are truly just and upheld in the fairest manner possible. We have a responsibility to see that every person among us who is accused of breaking these laws has a voice that is listened to fairly and that whatever punishment we allow as a result be fair and humane.
A Can of Judicial Worms
It's quite clear within the findings of the higher court judges involved with Jason's case, that it was not in their best interest to find that his original trial had been a failure of the system. From judge to judge, one ruling after another, is an exercise in gross negligence. They breeze through all the rights that were violated (throwing yet another on top of the pile) and in each finding each one moves on to the "bigger" issue at had. That, of course, is how they don't want this "can of worms" opened, the "can" being whether or not a judge who is a victim of sexual assault should be ruling over the trial of someone accused of sexual assault - more directly, a BENCH trial where they are the sole decider. With no precedent in Iowa at the time of Jason's case, this became ALL that it was about. An intellectually disabled boy was insignificant at this point and setting this case aside in anyway simply opened the door to problems that the judges were not going to allow to upset their lives. Jason would ultimately be the pawn that they would sacrifice. They read their unwillingness to let this case unravel, right into their findings, speaking of judicial meeting before hand to "confer" over this matter. They gave concerns such as: opening this can will open the door to every judge's personal life, that every convict will want to pursue their judge's past relentlessly - and that soon no one would want to be a judge anymore. Certainly a clear undermining of such coveted power - can't have anyone challenging their judgements While it can be argued that there are times when someone needs to be in charge of making final decisions - this leaves quite a nasty taste of how they really view their position when they are sacrificing someone's very rights to protect their own. This an abuse of power that goes beyond criminal, and they do so without hesitation, proving that they already hold themselves so high above the law that we can't touch them. They have excluded themselves from "We The People" and have moved on to find a more perfect union of their own.. This system has been left unchecked for so long and become so corrupted that the constitution with the bill of rights has become toilet paper for the powerful.
