Imprisoned former Columbus DA Mark Jones to be freed after serving year for misconduct
The former Columbus district attorney sentenced to a year in prison after pleading guilty to misconduct in office is about to be a free man again.
On Nov. 15, 2021, Mark Preston Jones was sentenced to five years in prison with one year to serve and the rest on probation when he abruptly cut his misconduct trial short by accepting a plea deal as jurors were deliberating.
Now Jones’ year in prison is ending.
The Georgia Department of Corrections says by policy it does not disclose inmates’ release dates, as that could threaten their safety on the outside, should anyone wish them harm. But the state Board of Pardons and Paroles confirmed Friday that Jones’ sentence will “max out” on Sunday, when he’s expected to walk free.
Jones, 41, spent more time in prison than he served in office. Elected in 2020, when he defeated incumbent DA Julia Slater, he was sworn in on Jan. 4, 2021, and worked 10 months before Gov. Brian Kemp suspended him the following Oct. 5, after he was indicted on nine felony charges.
It was a tumultuous tenure. After his election, Jones fired eight of the experienced prosecutors who’d served under Slater, delaying cases those attorneys were assigned to and further backlogging a judicial system already clogged by the effects of COVID-19 shutdowns.
He already faced felony charges from a 2019 alleged DUI crash when he ran for office, and then was arrested again during the campaign, accused of damaging the Columbus Civic Center parking lot with tire marks while filming a political ad featuring custom car enthusiasts.
With an outside prosecutor and visiting judge, he went to trial on those charges in September 2021. That ended in a mistrial when sequestered witnesses were compromised by viewing a live stream of the proceedings, but jurors afterward scoffed at the charges and said they would have found Jones not guilty.
“Waste of time,” one juror told reporters outside the courtroom. “We could have been taking care of more important stuff.”
Official misconduct
The evidence in Jones’ misconduct trial included a police body cam recording that showed the apparently intoxicated district attorney profanely haranguing a homicide detective outside a downtown bar, on July 16, 2021.
The detective, Cpl. Sherman Hayes, was the lead investigator in a fatal shooting police had decided was accidental, charging the suspect with involuntary manslaughter instead of murder.
Jones claimed the shooting was intentional, and told Hayes, “You should testify to that.”
Later he asked Hayes, “How can we indict him for murder?” When Hayes said it wasn’t murder, Jones went on a tirade: “Don’t say that bro, why the f--k would you say that?” he asked, calling the manslaughter charge “weak s--t” and adding, “What the f--k are you doing? You better charge that s--t with murder m-----r f----r.”
The special prosecutor in Jones’ case, Deputy Attorney General John Fowler, played the video for the jury. When Jones decided to plead guilty, visiting Judge Katherine Lumsden cited that episode during his sentencing, saying such conduct eroded the public’s faith in a fair justice system.
“When I watched that body cam video, all I could think was, ‘This does not make people trust the system,’” Lumsden told Jones. Prosecuting crimes does not mean winning at any cost, she added: “If it becomes that, then we have much bigger problems than the criminal justice system has already, and we can’t afford to let that happen.”
The other charges to which Jones pleaded involved trying to violate his oath of office by offering prosecutors $1,000 to pursue murder cases and mistreating the nephew of a homicide victim after the relative complained of how the case was handled.
Here are those counts:
- Attempting to violate his oath by trying to get then-Chief Assistant DA Sheneka Terry to accept $1,000 for a murder conviction.
- Attempting to violate his oath by trying to get Assistant District Attorney Kimberly Schwartz to accept $1,000 for announcing she was ready for trial in a murder case.
- Violating his oath by not assisting the homicide victim’s nephew in navigating the court system.
Jones decided to plead when the jury, after about seven hours of deliberation, said it had reached a unanimous decision on five of the nine charges he initially faced. After the plea, a juror told reporters the verdict would have been guilty on those counts.
Before sentencing Jones, Lumsden noted that he didn’t commit the offenses typical of some corruption cases, in that he did not seek to enrich himself at the public’s expense.
“You didn’t line your own pockets. You didn’t do some of the things that normally are involved when we think of public corruption,” the judge said. “But I think you got so caught up in being the DA that you forgot about the people you ran to represent.”
Jones had been free on bond, pending the outcome of his trial. Lumsden rejected his request to surrender four days later, and ordered him taken into custody immediately. He has not been free since.
License surrendered
Jones will not return to practicing law when he’s released next week: To avoid being disbarred, he voluntarily surrendered his law license this past January, while he was in prison.
“Mr. Jones respectfully asks the Supreme Court to accept this Petition for Voluntary Discipline and to accept the voluntary surrender of this license,” he wrote in the letter dated Jan. 27, adding he wanted “to resolve this matter without the need for formal proceedings.”
The Georgia Supreme Court unanimously accepted that in March: “We have reviewed the record and accept Jones’ petition for the voluntary surrender of his license,” the court wrote. “Accordingly, the name Mark Preston Jones hereby is removed from the rolls of persons entitled to practice law in the state of Georgia.”
Jones may apply to have his license re-instated in five years, according to the state bar association. He faced involuntary disbarment because of his felony convictions.