Biography
Harllel B. Jones was a Cleveland community organizer and founder of Afro Set, also known as the Black Nationalist Party for Self Defense. Authorities arrested him on October 12, 1971, accusing him of ordering a retaliatory shooting in which John Howard Smith was killed and Harlow Tate was wounded. A jury convicted him of second-degree murder and shooting with intent to kill or wound on March 28, 1972. The prosecution withheld a statement from a teenage witness whose account did not implicate Jones. A federal court overturned the conviction in 1977 because the suppression violated his right to due process. Jones left prison on $10,000 bond on June 24, 1977. Prosecutors dismissed the charges on October 17, 1978. Jones maintained that the prosecution was intended to silence his political organizing. He died in 2011.
Zadell describes the October 1971 secret-indictment arrest and the later reversal for withheld exculpatory evidence. A reversal is not itself the physical release date. The essay also describes Jones’s subsequent community reentry and youth work; its political interpretation of the prosecution is attributed to the author. Michael Zadell, By Any Means Necessary: History of New Libya / Afro Set, 2010, original PDF page 25. Source: https://clevelandmemory.contentdm.oclc.org/digital/api/collection/general/id/6349/download#page=25
Gordon J. Beggs, who attended the federal habeas hearing, identifies Chief Judge Frank Battisti of the Northern District of Ohio and ACLU lawyers Gary Kelder and Richard Aynes. His memoir describes the withheld witness statement and subsequent habeas relief and bail. These are participants in the federal collateral proceeding, not identification of the original criminal trial judge.
Before his later murder prosecution, Harllel Jones was arrested during the July 1968 Glenville disturbances after working on the Mayor’s Committee peace patrol. The 1969 federal staff study Shoot-Out in Cleveland reports that police accused him and six youths of violating the midnight curfew, searched his person and car, and made weapons allegations that changed in the police account. It states that the court dismissed the case on September 16, 1968 because the search was illegal. The study also records his March 3, 1969 false-arrest and illegal-search lawsuit against the three arresting officers. It does not establish that this earlier arrest lasted more than a day or give an actual release date, so it should not be merged into his separate 1971–1977 imprisonment.
