Soon enough, Roland was making the first of seven trips to Taylor’s hometown of Louisville. Then, he reached out to the family of Breonna Taylor, killed that March in a police raid gone wrong. Floyd’s family was from Houston, where Roland was still located, so he reached out to their family to see how he could help. On May 25, 2020, George Floyd was killed by a police officer in Minneapolis. However, once a spat between Rockets owner Tilman Fertitta and then-head coach Mike D’Antoni led to a purge of the coaching staff in early May 2019, Roland suddenly found himself with enough time to get involved with things that spoke to him.Īnd the coming year would provide plenty of opportunities. Such gigs, he notes, severely limited his time to do much else: “Most people that don’t work in the NBA, they don’t understand that this is a seven-day-a-week job.” While Roland maintained a passive interest in the case as years went by and as updates happened to appear in the news, he concedes that he wasn’t really paying too much attention until his own circumstances changed.įor years, he had worked either on an NBA team’s coaching staff or as a personal skills trainer for players, in particular gaining such notoriety for his work with James Harden that he got hired as a player development coach by the Rockets during the guard’s time in Houston. (Oklahoma Department of Corrections via AP, File)
#JULIUS JONES UPDATE TRIAL#
Jones, who's black, says his 2002 trial was tainted when a juror used a racist term to describe him. 16, 2019, asked Oklahoma officials to consider a clemency petition for Jones, who's on death row for a murder conviction in the July 1999 killing of Paul Howell. 5, 2018, file photo provided by the Oklahoma Department of Corrections shows Julius Jones. And so, unfortunately, because he was wrapped up with those guys, they were able to manipulate the situation and frame him for the murder.”įILE - This Feb. “Even though he was in school and had a bright future ahead of him, he didn’t break those ties. “Julius just didn’t break those ties,” he said. Roland, like those on Jones’ new legal team, believes there is a pretty straightforward explanation for what really happened the fateful night of July 28, 1999. Jordan got a 30-year sentence, and was released after only 15. Jones got the blame, and the death sentence.
While he concedes he was not savvy enough then to understand all the layers to the case, he still had trouble squaring the media depictions of the apparent perpetrators - Jones, transformed from an engineering student at the University of Oklahoma (and an admitted shoplifter and small-time thief) into a brazen carjacker who murdered a man in front of his two young children just to steal his Suburban SUV and Jordan, the acquaintance with a bad reputation and a history of gang activity who this time merely happened to get dragged into an unexpectedly bad situation. Roland first heard of the case as a high school senior.
“I have a hard time believing that.” ‘I have to do more’ “I have a hard time believing that God would bring us this far and give us this much momentum, this much worldwide awareness to Julius Jones’s case, just to have him executed anyway,” he said. But Roland is holding out hope for his friend. Still, a groundswell of national support has emerged, pleading for intervention.
#JULIUS JONES UPDATE DRIVER#
There is a website ( ) and multiple docuseries ( one from actress Viola Davis, another from ABC’s 20/20 program) which spell out the questionable components surrounding Jones’ case: How the sole eyewitness’ description of the perpetrator more closely resembles Christopher Jordan, the alleged getaway driver who testified that Jones was the gunman in exchange for a lenient sentence how Jones was repeatedly let down by his overworked and under-experienced team of public defenders, who acknowledge mistakenly denying him the chance to present his alibi at trial how racism in then-nearly-all-white Edmond, Okla., played out in both the police investigation (Jones alleges one of the arresting officers called him the N-word and dared him to try and run, so that the officer could shoot him in the back) and in the trial itself (one of the jurors claims a fellow juror remarked that “this trial is a waste of time they should just take this, shoot him, and bury him under the jail,” and how the judge deemed the revelation irrelevant).Īlong the way, every appeal filed by Jones’ new lawyers has been denied. Kevin Stitt will be swayed by a growing chorus of voices - including from the Oklahoma Pardon and Parole Board - suggesting there is enough doubt about Jones’ guilt to warrant commuting his sentence.
Now, they are in a race against time, hoping that before Jones’ execution is carried out, Oklahoma Gov. “I never believed that he did it,” Roland told The Salt Lake Tribune on Tuesday morning.
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