THE STUDENT VOICE SINCE 1904
INSIDE
ARTS & CULTURE 64-year-old professor
KU PSO unleashes Phog the Dog p. 2
kayaks length of Arkansas River — for the
Letter to the Editor from Jeff Long
second time The University Daily Kansan
vol. 137 // iss. 10 Thurs., Sept. 20, 2018
SEE KAYAKS • PAGE 4
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What’s next for Mass Street?
As retail vacancies increase, dowtown shop owners are looking for ways to bring business back. KALLI JO SMITH @kallijosmith It was a typical day in the shop for Melinda Nichols, store manager of Lululemon, a recently added pop-up clothing shop on Massachusetts Street. As customers were coming in and out of the store, Nichols said business was as good as ever. However, she did notice there was one thing missing from Mass Street since her arrival: other retail businesses. “It’s not like we’re missing a ton of businesses, but, I really wonder what is making [retail] businesses not stay on Mass Street,” Nichols said. Vacancy rates downtown have climbed within the last year, said Sally Zogry, executive director of the non-profit group Downtown Lawrence. According to a recent report by the Lawrence-Journal World, there are currently 16 vacant storefronts on Mass Street. Mass Street has seen vacancies from Buckle, Fortuity and Ernst & Son Hardware, but each closed based on entirely different circumstances. Sara Scott, store manager at Glik’s, which is located at 717 Massachusetts Street, said she also wonders why retail businesses continue to struggle.
The main factors Scott cited stemmed from issues such as high rent rates and inventory issues. She also said some of the small businesses have closed as family members retire or pass away. “We just lost Buckle about a year or so ago, and now with Fortuity gone, it really makes you wonder what’s making these shops leave,” Scott said. “Since Fortuity left, we really lost some of our main retail stores down here.” Scott has been working for retail businesses on Mass Street for over six years, and is no stranger to witnessing shops close, despite the fact that every business she has worked for has closed based on entirely different factors. Later this year, downtown retail stores such as Saffee’s and Envy Boutique will be closing as well, according to Zogry. Does this mean Massachusetts Street has a vacancy problem? Zogry said not entirely. However, Downtown Lawrence has seen a drop in retail shops on Mass Street recently, mainly due to a recurring cycle. Most commercial properties on Massachusetts Street operate on a fiveyear lease, many of which ended in 2013, Zogry said. Leases begin to end this
Bob(Jiatong) Li/KANSAN Reports show an increasing number of business vacancies on Massachusetts Street . year, which Zogry said is why the public is seeing a decrease in retail stores downtown. Concerning other factors that play into what’s making businesses leave, Zogry said rent for buildings downtown tends to be high for businesses. “The rents are high here, and there’s a lot of discussion about that,” Zogry said. “And we as Downtown Lawrence have no influence on that though.” Zogry said while small retail stores might be struggling downtown, corporate clothing businesses like Urban Outfitters, Lu-
lulemon and Francesca’s manage to stay afloat due to being international and having more brand awareness. Although individuals might think smaller businesses may hurt from having larger chain retail stores on Mass Street, Zogry said this isn’t necessarily the case. As Downtown Lawrence attempts to bring more businesses to the area, large corporations may benefit small businesses by helping them gain awareness in the community. “The challenge is to remind people of what we do
have because Lawrence has a lot of great stores,” Zogry said. “If a family comes down and they’re shopping at say Francesca’s, and that store might not have what they’re looking for, then they might go to another store and it might have what they’re looking. But we could use more density, and we have lost quite a few clothing stores over the last few years.” Zogry said in spite of the vacancy issue, Downtown Lawrence is currently asking her organization and its members to figure out what businesses the public would like to see.
Members of the community can send their suggestions to downtownlawrence.com through the Contact Us page. “We have reached out to them to ask what they might feel they want to see on Mass Street; whether it be a hat store or a baby store, or I don’t know,” Zogry said. “[The business owners] hear from their customers, ‘oh I like to come here for, or it would be great to have this.’ So we’re reaching out to members, and they’re listening to the public to get some feedback.”
“This was a needle in a haystack, when we got that,” Craig said. After investigating Amos more, Craig said they were able to “tie” him to the house he was picked up and dropped off at. He had been living there with his mother at the time, according to a neighbor. In the original trial, Jones had never been linked to the house. “So the original investigation, the detective put his card on the door and it said ‘call me.’ Nobody called,” Craig said. “I mean, it’s a house where you’re buying drugs. Nobody’s going to call the detective. They didn’t follow up, they didn’t sit on the house, nothing.” Amos “testified and denied involvement” in the crime, according to the National Registry of Exonerations. Jones was exonerated five days after the testimonial, on June 12, 2016. He had been in prison for almost 17 years of the 19-year conviction. “I did not think I was going to get exonerated. We had everything that we needed, but still, I just couldn’t get my hopes up until I heard it out of the judge’s mouth,” Jones said. “Alice Craig just kept telling me, he’s going to release you, he’s going to release you, and I still wasn’t accepting it for what it was.” Now, Jones is working
to improve the lives of exonerates like himself. Through the Project for Innocence, he was connected with two other exonerees – Lamonte McIntyre, who spent 23 years in prison for murder, and Floyd Bledsoe, who spent almost 16 years for murder, child sex abuse and kidnapping. The three of them testified in front of lawmakers at the Kansas State Capitol last spring, and on May 3, Kansas became the 33rd state to honor a “compensation bill,” which provides exonerates such as Jones, McIntyre and Bledsoe with financial compensation of $65,000 per year of wrongful conviction. “You can never get the time back, but when you’re in a position financially to not worry about stress over money, that takes a lot of stress off of life, period. I’m just proud to be a part of that,” Jones said. “No matter what I went through, I’m just proud to be a part of that and to come out with something positive from this.” Above all else, Jones said he is thankful for the help that Craig, the faculty and the students at the Project for Innocence provided him. “We became friends,” Jones said. “They believed in my innocence and they went a long way with me.”
KU Law School helps overturn wrongful conviction SYDNEY HOOVER @sydhoover17 Richard Jones says the only word he can find to describe the feeling he had when he was released from prison is “surreal.” With the assistance of the Paul E. Wilson Project for Innocence at the University of Kansas School of Law, Jones was exonerated in June 2017 after serving almost 17 years in prison for a crime he did not commit. Jones filed his own petition for Certification of Innocence in the state of Kansas on Aug. 29. In addition to monetary compensation of over $1 million for the 17 years he spent in prison, the petition would also give him tuition assistance to attend a postsecondary school for himself and his daughters, counseling, housing and health care assistance and more. “I don’t know if I would ever feel like that again in my life,” Jones said. “The fact that my kids who were babies when I went in and I wasn’t around for all that time, they could see me come out the way I did, with my name cleared. That was just a wonderful feeling.” Jones was arrested in 1999 after a two witnesses identified him from a random selection of photos as the culprit in a burglary
Contributed Photo After being wrongly convicted for a crime in 1999, Richard Jones, left, was freed with the help of the KU Law School. Jones was mistaken for Ricky Amos, right. in Johnson County. The burglary, committed at a Walmart in Roeland Park, occurred on Memorial Day in 1999. The burglar, who witnesses were able to identify by the name ‘Ricky,’ had been picked up by two other men from a house for a drug deal. Ricky proceeded to rob a purse from a woman in the Walmart parking lot, then the men dropped him back off at the house, according to Alice Craig, supervising attorney at the Paul E. Wilson Project for Innocence through the School of Law. Jones and his family testified that he had spent the day at home in Kansas City, Missouri, celebrating his girlfriend’s birthday.
But it wasn’t enough. He was convicted of robbery on April 24, 2001 and sentenced to 19 years in prison, according to the National Registry of Exonerations. “[The police investigating] said they had the description from the victim and the people in the car and they had the name Rick or Ricky,” Craig said. “They looked for a black male or hispanic with the name Rick, Ricky or Richard, and they had one of the witnesses come in and flip through six photos at a time and at the 202nd photo the witness picked out Richard.” Jones sent an application in to the Midwest Innocence Project, who forwarded his case onto
the Project for Innocence at the University. His case was picked up in 2015 – 14 years after his conviction. Craig said for the first year of the project, attorneys could not find sufficient evidence to begin litigating the case. “There really was nothing that put him at that location or at the crime. He had a solid alibi — the problem was it was his family and the state just argued, ‘well it’s your family, they would lie for you,’” Craig said. Then there was a breakthrough, discovered by Jones himself. He said that he was talking with one of the other inmates in the prison when he heard about a man named Ricky Amos.