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Do you really think I will get a fair trial in this case.
This woman was innocent and she was screwed by the system!
Confession frees woman imprisoned for 7 years Nick R. Martin, Tribune Federal prosecutors have dropped their charges against a woman who maintained for more than seven years that she was wrongly convicted in an armed bank robbery in Gilbert in 2001. Rachel Jernigan, 38, was freed from a Florence prison on Tuesday night, just hours after Assistant U.S. Attorney Michael Morrissey agreed to drop the charges. "It's been a long time," Jernigan said by phone on Wednesday. "I was locked up for seven years, two months and 26 days for a crime that I didn't commit." The case is the second big win for Carefree attorney Alan Simpson, who also represented Ray Krone, a Phoenix man twice convicted of the same murder and later exonerated by DNA evidence in 2002. Simpson took over the case last year when Jernigan was given a new trial by a federal appellate judge. Jernigan was arrested in 2000 on suspicion of robbing a Bank of America at 15 E. Guadalupe Road in Gilbert. It was considered a federal crime, so Jernigan was arrested by the FBI. To the agent who arrested her, Jernigan's description fit the robber's almost exactly. Both were about 5 feet tall, Hispanic and had pockmarked faces, according to court records. To her family, friends and lawyers, Jernigan insisted she wasn't the one who robbed the bank, but a jury didn't believe her. In 2001 she was sentenced to 14 years in prison. Almost three years later, Jernigan learned that another woman who looked almost exactly like her had been arrested and convicted of robbing banks at about the same time in the East Valley. Jernigan asked for a new trial in 2004, but a federal judge denied it. She argued her case to the 9th Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals, saying the FBI and U.S. Attorney's Office were to blame for not providing the information about the other arrest to the defense, court records show. In July of last year, the court scheduled a new trial for March 2008. On Friday, however, the other woman confessed to the robbery Jernigan was convicted of committing, prompting the government to determine another conviction was unlikely, court documents show. Late Wednesday, a spokeswoman for the U.S. Attorney's Office in Arizona declined to comment on the case because she did not know the details. Jernigan said the government has not apologized for the conviction. "This is a justice system that I'm supposed to trust in?" she asked. "Now I have no faith in the justice system
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