People we’ve helped exonerate
Artis Whitehead
Artis Whitehead was released from prison on December 15, 2023, and formally exonerated on January 31, 2024 — exactly 21 years to the day from his arrest — after spending nearly two decades in prison for a crime he didn’t commit.
Case history
On the morning of May 9, 2002, a man carrying what appeared to be a Home Depot delivery box walked into the basement of B.B. King’s Blues Club on Beale Street in Memphis and spent more than an hour holding employees at gunpoint, tying them up with ripped phone cords, stealing cash and jewelry, and shooting one man in the head. The bullet didn’t pierce the skull, but the violence was real and the trauma lasting. When police arrived, witnesses described the robber consistently: a Black male, 35 to 40 years old, between five feet four and five feet seven inches tall, slim build, 140 to 170 pounds, with curly hair, a beard, a small mustache, sunglasses, and a hat.
Artis Whitehead is six feet one inch tall, weighs more than 250 pounds, was bald at the time of the crime, and is described by everyone who knows him as a large man; an avid weightlifter who works out three to four times a week. He bore no resemblance to the description.
For months, police made no arrests. Then, in January 2003, eight months after the crime, a tip came into Crime Stoppers naming Artis. The tipster, it would later emerge, was Gregory Jones — a man facing more than 500 years in federal prison for armed robberies, who had been calling the lead detective two or three times a week looking for ways to help himself, and who made the call from that detective’s own cell phone. Jones knew Artis because they had once dated sisters. He had no information connecting Artis to the crime.
Police built a photo lineup around Artis and showed it to four witnesses. Two couldn’t make an identification. Of the remaining two, one, Lakina Pree, who had seen the robber for approximately 60 seconds during the most traumatic moments of her life, picked Artis. A second witness identified him days later, testifying at trial that after months of silence he was simply “optimistic” that the right person had finally been found.
At trial, one witness described the robber as “average, average, average” with a lean, wiry build. Asked if he would describe Artis that way, he replied: “Doesn’t seem to be an average guy. No.” Witness after witness confirmed that the robber was shorter and slimmer than the man sitting at the defense table. Fingerprints recovered at the scene excluded Artis. The clothing seized from his home didn’t match. A grainy surveillance tape showed a robber whose face couldn’t be seen. There was no physical evidence linking him to the crime.
Artis also had an alibi: he was at a mandatory first-day-of-work training session when the robbery took place. That alibi was never presented to the jury.
On November 14, 2003, the jury convicted Artis Whitehead on all counts. The judge sentenced him to 249 years in prison.
Mr. Whitehead lost decades of his life after being wrongfully convicted of a crime he did not commit. TIP has been working on this case for the last four years because we believe in Mr. Whitehead's innocence. We are grateful that Mr. Whitehead trusted us to fight on his behalf.
Jessica Van Dyke Legal Director
Building the case for innocence
TIP attorney Jessica Van Dyke, working with pro bono attorneys from Bass, Berry & Sims, took on Artis’s case and spent four years building a 75-page petition backed by nearly 600 pages of exhibits. What they uncovered was a prosecution constructed on hidden information, a compromised informant, and a defense attorney who knew about a disqualifying conflict of interest and did nothing about it.
The Crime Stoppers tip that started everything had never been disclosed for what it actually was. Gregory Jones — the federal prisoner seeking leniency — had placed the call that named Artis from the cell phone of the detective running the robbery unit. The prosecution knew Jones was the source. They knew he was a convicted felon. They knew his federal sentence reduction request had been denied. They knew he had previously given false information in another serious case — a bank robbery in which a guard had been killed — and that detectives had ultimately concluded he had made that up too. They knew he had eventually been paid $900 for the Crime Stoppers tip. None of this had been disclosed to the defense.
Artis’s trial attorney had learned mid-trial that Jones existed — because the federal prosecutor happened to walk through the courthouse on an unrelated matter and mentioned it. He also learned that Jones was represented by an attorney in his own office. He disclosed this to the judge, acknowledged it was a possible conflict, and then kept trying the case. After the conviction, he withdrew — and wrote Artis a letter acknowledging he had known about the conflict “at some point” during the representation.
Jones himself later admitted that he had falsely implicated Artis in order to get a reduced sentence.
TIP also retained two experts on eyewitness identification, Dr. Jeffrey Neuschatz and Dr. Margaret Bull Kovera, who independently concluded that numerous factors made the identifications of Artis unreliable: the presence of a weapon, the extreme brevity of each witness’s exposure to the robber, the stress of the situation, and the eight-month gap between the crime and the photo lineup. As Dr. Neuschatz put it plainly: “Every single witness provided a description that did not match Mr. Whitehead.”
And Lakina Pree, one of the two witnesses who had identified Artis, had already put it in writing herself. In 2017, years before TIP became involved, she provided a statement saying she now felt it could have been “human error.” Emotions, fear, and the passage of time had shaped a positive identification she was never truly sure of.
A police procedures expert concluded that using Jones to make an anonymous Crime Stoppers tip, while concealing both his identity and his motive, was fundamentally improper. Had the conflict of interest not surfaced accidentally through a chance hallway encounter, the true source of the tip might never have come to light at all.
Exoneration
Following two days of hearings in September 2023, Judge Jennifer Fitzgerald issued a 93-page ruling on December 15, 2023, granting Artis a new trial and vacating his conviction. The judge found that the prosecution had concealed Jones’s identity, his motive, his payment, and his prior record. She found that his trial attorney had known about the conflict and failed to act. And she found, with unusual directness, that Jones had lied — that he had no information connecting Artis to the crime and had named him simply to help himself.
“The Court has no confidence in the reliability or sufficiency of the evidence against Mr. Whitehead,” Judge Fitzgerald wrote. “No physical evidence connected him to the crime. There was no proof presented that he had ever been to Beale Street or B.B. King’s or that he knew of the interior of the building or its basement.”
Hours after the ruling was issued, Artis walked out on bond. On January 31, 2024 — 21 years to the day from his arrest — the prosecution dismissed all charges.
Image Credit: Jennifer Watkins, Lyra Photography
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