COLUMBIA, S.C. — Timothy Jones Jr., the man convicted of killing all five of his children, will appeal his death sentence next week before the South Carolina Supreme Court.
Jones has a hearing set for Tuesday morning in front of the justices, where his lawyers will go before the judge to contest Jones' conviction and sentence handed down in 2019. The appeal was filed shortly afterward.
Jones is arguing the trial court made mistakes during the jury selection, refusing to instruct the jury on the consequences of a not guilty by reason of insanity verdict, failing to suppress evidence obtained at a safety checkpoint, excluding relevant mitigating evidence during sentencing, and admitting autopsy photographs of the victims.
On June 13, 2019, a Lexington County jury took just one hour and 45 minutes to decide that Jones deserved the death penalty rather than life in prison. That came after an eight-day long sentencing phase of the trial, which itself following a three week-long murder trial.
Jones did not take the stand to testify in his defense in either the guilt or penalty phase of the trial. However, a confession audio recording from 2014 was played in court.
Jones killed 8-year-old Merah Gracie, 7-year-old Elias, 6-year-old Nahtahn, 2-year-old Gabriel, and 1-year-old Abigail Elaine on August 28, 2014 at their Lexington County home. He then drove around with their bodies for days before disposing of the remains in a field in Alabama.
Archive: Timothy Jones Jr. sentenced to death by jury
Over the course of five weeks in both the trial and sentencing phase, prosecutors laid out the case that Jones was a cold-blooded killer, who went and killed each of his children after causing his first son, Nahtahn, to die by forcing him to do physical exercises. Nahtahn had wanted to go back to his mother before the killings, and in a phone call played in court between Jones and his father, the killer tried to blame the little boy or causing him to snap.
Jones' lawyers argued their client was insane at the time of the killings, but in finding him guilty of murder, the jury rejected that premise. In the sentencing phase, the children's mother, Amber Kyzer, asked for mercy for Jones, even though she said she'd understand if the jury chose death. Several of his Jones' relatives, including his father and grandmother, begged the jury to spare his life.
Jones' was originally scheduled for execution in November of 2019, but that was delayed due to the automatic appeal process. In general, inmates spend years on death row before they're ultimately killed.
The death penalty is legal in South Carolina but no one has been executed since 2011. That was because of an inability by the state to get the drugs necessary to execute inmates by lethal injection.
But the South Carolina General Assembly passed a new law earlier this year that aimed to bypass that problem by offering inmates the option of death by either the electric chair or firing squad. Gov. Henry McMaster signed the measure into law, saying it's necessary to give families justice.
After some appeals by two inmates, a court upheld the legality of the death penalty, but South Carolina has yet to set up their procedure for the firing squad as a method of execution.