Rickey Jackson was only 18 years old when the justice system took his life away.
He was young, newly back in Cleveland, and still trying to figure out what his future would become. Instead, he was arrested, convicted, sentenced to death, and sent into the machinery of prison for a murder he always said he did not commit.
For nearly four decades, the world moved on without him.
Presidents changed. Cities changed. Technology changed. Entire generations grew up. But Rickey Jackson remained behind bars, carrying the weight of a crime that evidence would later show he should never have been convicted of in the first place.
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| Rickey Jackson, Wiley Bridgeman, and Kwame Ajamu after a legal victory in Cleveland, holding court documents connected to the collapse of their 1975 murder convictions. |
The Murder That Started It All
On May 19, 1975, Harold Franks, a Cleveland money-order salesman, was attacked during a robbery outside a small grocery store on the city’s East Side. Franks was shot and killed. Another person, Ann Robinson, was also wounded during the attack.
The crime was violent, public, and shocking. Police needed answers quickly. Within days, attention turned toward three young Black men from the neighborhood: Rickey Jackson, Wiley Bridgeman, and Ronnie Bridgeman, who later became known as Kwame Ajamu.
None of the three had a criminal record. No physical evidence tied them to the murder. No forensic evidence connected them to the scene. But the prosecution had one thing powerful enough to change all their lives: the testimony of a child.
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Ricky Jackson, Wiley Bridgeman, and Kwame Ajamu after a legal victory in Cleveland, holding court documents connected to the collapse of their 1975 murder convictions. |
The Boy Who Said He Saw Everything
The state’s case relied heavily on Eddie Vernon, a 12-year-old boy who claimed he had witnessed the crime. By the time he testified, he was 13.
Vernon identified Rickey Jackson as the gunman and implicated the Bridgeman brothers. His words became the backbone of the prosecution’s case. But from the beginning, there were serious problems.
His story shifted. His account of where he was and what he could actually see was inconsistent. Other children said he had been on the school bus with them when the gunshots were heard. A defense witness said she saw two men near the store before the attack, and they were not Jackson or the Bridgemans.
Still, in 1975, the juries believed the testimony. Rickey Jackson, Wiley Bridgeman, and Ronnie Bridgeman were convicted. Jackson and Wiley were sent to death row.
Death Row, Then Decades of Silence
Rickey Jackson’s death sentence was eventually reduced to life in prison, but freedom did not come with it. He would spend year after year inside Ohio prisons, insisting he was innocent.
There were chances to make prison life easier. There were parole possibilities. But Jackson refused to say he had done something he had not done. To admit guilt would have been the price of possible freedom, and he would not pay it.
That decision cost him time that could never be returned.
“I feel like I went to sleep at 18 and I woke up at 60.”
That sentence captures the horror of his case more clearly than almost anything else. Rickey Jackson did not just lose years. He lost youth, family moments, ordinary mornings, birthdays, relationships, privacy, freedom, and the simple right to become himself.
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| Rickey Jackson’s 1975 Cleveland booking photograph, taken after his arrest in the Harold Franks murder case. He was 18 years old when he was accused and later sentenced to death. |
The Truth Finally Came Out
Decades later, Eddie Vernon came forward and admitted that he had not actually witnessed the murder. He said he had lied and that pressure from police had shaped the false testimony that helped send three innocent men to prison.
That recantation changed everything.
The Ohio Innocence Project became involved, and the old case began to collapse. In November 2014, prosecutors no longer fought the request for a new trial. The convictions of Rickey Jackson and Wiley Bridgeman were vacated, and the charges were dismissed.
After 39 years behind bars, Rickey Jackson walked free.
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| Rickey Jackson with Eddie Vernon, the former child witness whose false testimony helped send him to prison for nearly 39 years before Vernon finally recanted. |
The Cost of a False Conviction
The state later recognized Jackson as wrongfully imprisoned. According to the Ohio Court of Claims, he had spent 14,178 days in prison for a murder he did not commit.
He received compensation from the state, including an initial payment of just over one million dollars and a later additional payment of more than two and a half million dollars. But no amount of money could return what had been taken.
The most haunting part of Rickey Jackson’s story is not only that he was innocent. It is that the warning signs were there from the beginning. No physical evidence. No forensic link. Contradictory testimony. A child witness. Other leads that were not fully pursued.
And yet the system moved forward anyway.
Forgiveness After 39 Years
One of the most unexpected parts of the case came after Jackson’s release. He eventually met Eddie Vernon, the man whose childhood testimony had helped convict him.
For many people, forgiveness after such a loss would seem impossible. But Jackson chose not to live the rest of his life trapped inside bitterness. He has spoken publicly about time, peace, and the importance of not wasting the freedom he finally received.
That does not make what happened less devastating. It makes his survival even more remarkable.
Rickey Jackson’s case is remembered as one of the longest wrongful imprisonments in American history. But it is more than a record. It is a warning about eyewitness testimony, pressure, race, poverty, rushed investigations, and the terrifying power of one false story when the system decides to believe it.
He entered prison as a teenager.
He came out as a man nearing 60.
And the murder of Harold Franks remains officially unsolved.
Video published by Cleveland.com showing Rickey Jackson in court after his conviction was thrown out in November 2014.
National Registry of Exonerations; StoryCorps/NPR, “A False Witness and the Man He Put in Prison for Decades”; Smithsonian Magazine, “After 39 Years of Wrongful Imprisonment, Ricky Jackson Is Finally Free”; Ohio Court of Claims case summaries; Innocence Project coverage of Rickey Jackson’s exoneration.