Just before 1:45 a.m. on August 10, 1997, a man broke into a home in the Dinkytown neighborhood in Minneapolis, Minnesota. A man and a woman were asleep in the bedroom, and they awoke to find the intruder on their bed. The woman screamed. There was a brief struggle, and the intruder fled. The woman called 911, and the police responded.
The woman, J.B., described the intruder as a Black man approximately 20-30 years old, wearing a black short-sleeve shirt and a medium Afro hairstyle. The police canvassed the neighborhood, looking for a man who matched that description.
While officers interviewed J.B. and her boyfriend, P.H., a man named David Jones approached. Jones, who was 32 years old, said he used to live next door, and that he had accidentally returned to his old apartment. Jones said that he saw a man leave the couple’s house and nearly run him over on foot as he ran away. He described the man as a stout Black man with a mustache and goatee.
During the neighborhood canvas, police spotted 47-year-old Sherman Townsend, who had been parked nearby and said he had been walking back to a friend’s house after buying cigarettes. Police arrested him and brought him to the house. J.B. could not make an identification but said Townsend’s build seemed about right. An officer asked Jones to make an identification, and he said he was “a thousand percent sure” that Townsend was the person he had encountered.
Townsend was charged with first-degree burglary. At the time of his arrest, Townsend had a lengthy record, including several previous burglary convictions.
After the arrest, the Hennepin County District Attorney’s Office offered Townsend a plea deal with a possible sentence of about four years in prison.
Townsend rejected the offer. “I’m innocent,” he said at a hearing. “I have to go for the whole ball of wax.”
As Townsend prepared for a trial, Jones gave a statement to a defense investigator that said Townsend wasn’t the man he saw that night. He also testified at a pretrial hearing that he could not identify the person who ran into him but that it was not Townsend, who he said was shorter than the person he saw.
The state had served Jones with a subpoena to appear in court, but he failed to show up. He was arrested and held in contempt. He was then released and appeared at Townsend’s trial. Although Jones testified that the clothes Townsend was wearing at the time of his arrest were not the clothes worn by the man who ran into him, he also testified that he had identified Townsend at the crime scene as the man he saw running from the house. He compared Townsend’s build to that of Emmitt Smith, a running back for the Dallas Cowboys.
Jones testified that he had signed the defense statement exculpating Townsend because at the time he was mad at the prosecuting attorney. Jones said he only saw Townsend for a moment and that he had been drinking that night and gotten lost after leaving a tavern.
Outside the presence of the jury, Jones also testified that he did not have any convictions as an adult.
J.B. and P.H. testified about the break-in and their panic when the intruder was in their bedroom. P.H.’s young daughter was also asleep on a downstairs sofa. P.H. said the intruder was very strong and pinned him to the mattress before he was able to break free.
Neither adult identified Townsend at trial, but J.B. said, “From his frame, I think his frame is very similar.” P.H. said the room was so dark that he was unable to determine the intruder’s race.
No physical or forensic evidence connected Townsend to the crime. Townsend did not testify, and he would later say that his attorney, Stanley Nathanson, told him that testifying would expose Townsend to questions about his previous convictions. Even with that decision, the state was still able to introduce these past crimes as evidence of prior bad acts.
The jury convicted Townsend of first-degree burglary on January 27, 1998. Townsend was sentenced to 20 years in prison.
Townsend filed a series of appeals, challenging his conviction and his sentence. In his first appeal, filed in 1998, he said that Nathanson had provided ineffective representation by not properly challenging the show-up identification that police used when Jones first identified Townsend. Townsend also said that Nathanson should have objected to the testimony of a police officer who was at the crime scene and said she immediately thought of Townsend after hearing about the break-in.
A district court judge denied Townsend’s appeal on December 8, 1998. The Minnesota Court of Appeals affirmed the conviction, and the courts later upheld his sentence. (The Minnesota Supreme Court indefinitely suspended Nathanson’s license in 2012 for a wide range of misconduct between 2003 and 2009.)
In April 2007, Jones and Townsend were both incarcerated at the Moose Lake Correctional Facility in northern Minnesota. Jones would later testify that he worked the food line and spotted Townsend, initially unsure of how or why he recognized him. Finally, it clicked, and Jones talked to Townsend. It wasn’t just that Jones had falsely identified Townsend and testified against him; Jones said he was the actual intruder.
Townsend, represented by the Great North Innocence Project, filed a motion for a new trial on July 26, 2007. (Townsend was the organization’s first client.) The state opposed the motion, and an evidentiary hearing was held on September 24, 2007.
Jones testified about his decision to take responsibility for his actions. At the time, he was in prison on a conviction of fourth-degree criminal sexual conduct. He testified that he had been planning to rape J.B. and didn’t realize P.H. was there when he broke in. He provided details about the house, including a floor plan, and also explained why he misdirected the police in their investigation.
He said: “What I remember telling the cop was a Black guy bumped into me as I was coming and ran down the street.”
Townsend’s attorney asked: “Why did you say it was a Black guy?
“Well, because it would be believable,” Jones said, later adding, “I mean, without being disrespectful, I mean telling a whole bunch of white cops in Dinkytown that a Black man, you know … it didn’t seem that farfetched and I knew that they would latch on to it.”
During cross-examination, the prosecutor walked Jones through his trial testimony, where he clearly identified Townsend and described the build of the man he said ran from the house as similar to the description given by J.B.
During the closing arguments at the hearing, Julie Jonas, an attorney with the Great North Innocence Project, said Townsend was an innocent man. She said Jones’s testimony was credible. He had recanted his trial testimony and inculpated himself, and he provided details of the crime that only the true perpetrator would know. In addition, while the statute of limitations for perjury and burglary had expired, Jonas argued that Jones’s recantation still placed him in legal jeopardy because he faced other penalties through the state’s sex-offenders program based on his testimony about the burglary and other uncharged incidents.
Jonas also said that Nathanson was in essence an accomplice to Townsend’s wrongful conviction.
“When you read this, your honor, and you review the examination and cross-examination that this attorney was doing, it was a mess,” she said. “You couldn’t tell what points he was trying to get at. He let in hearsay and double hearsay. His closing argument was roughly 10 pages long, compared to the state’s 40 pages. He argued for a quarter of the time. At the end of his closing argument, Mr. Townsend tried to fire him. He realized that he could have done a better job than his attorney had just done for him.”
The state said Jones’s hearing testimony was unreliable, and that everything that Jones testified about could have been information he learned from Townsend. The state noted that Jones was a slight man, while both J.B. and P.H. testified that the intruder was heavy enough to pin them down.
Townsend’s motion had also said that Jones falsely testified at the trial that he had no previous felony convictions—he had several assault convictions in Illinois—and that the state had failed to disclose this evidence.
At the hearing, Judge Deborah Hedlund asked the state about this evidentiary issue. The prosecutor called it a “regrettable circumstance,” but said the state didn’t know of this evidence at trial and had no way of knowing it. He said Illinois was well-known for its problems providing access to these records.
Before Judge Hedlund ruled on the petition, the state and Townsend’s attorneys reached a deal. Townsend withdrew his petition, and the state agreed to resentence him to time served. He was released from prison on October 2, 2007.
After his release, Townsend worked as a janitor at a community center. He retired in 2023. He had applied for a pardon on August 15, 2012, but was turned down.
Still represented by the Great North Innocence Project, Townsend re-applied for a pardon on August 30, 2024.
In the new application, Townsend’s attorneys wrote that Townsend had been a model citizen since his release. He had kept out of trouble and was deeply engaged in his community. The application noted that Townsend was not seeking a pardon for his other convictions and that he was not hiding from his record.
“At the heart of this petition is the idea that justice is at the root of our ideals as Americans,” the application said. “That a man should be released from prison, halfway through his prison term, after another man confesses to the crime, yet should still remain guilty in the eyes of the State, is a blemish on the principle of justice that is manifest in the laws that govern the state of Minnesota and the United States of America.”
On July 9, 2025, the Minnesota Board of Pardons unanimously voted to pardon Townsend for the burglary conviction. The board’s members were Governor Tim Walz, Attorney General Keith Ellison, and Natalie Hudson, the chief justice of the Minnesota Supreme Court.
Walz said in a statement, “Mr. Townsend, I recognize that there is no apology for the 10 years that you spent in prison, but it’s clear to me that we are lucky to have you in our community.”
“It’s a relief, a very big relief,” Townsend said. “I didn’t do the crime. I didn’t want to die with that on my record.”
– Ken Otterbourg
Posting Date: 07-18-2025
Last Update Date: 07-18-2025
