Jesse Brooks would like to wish everyone a happy and healthy holiday season. Jesse’s supporters, on the other hand, are wishing for a fair and unbiased habeas hearing for him sometime in March 2018, which he well deserves. Jesse Brooks was implicated in a case he had nothing to do with and he has spent nearly 10 years wrongfully incarcerated. Jesse’s prosecutor Janice Rundles had her own agenda and, like many overly-ambitious prosecutors, cared more about gaining a conviction than conducting a fair trial. Jesse was condemned from the very beginning when his face was featured under front-page headlines of the Millionaire Murder Case. The fact that Jesse was 3,000 miles away when Michael Benton, a self-proclaimed drug and alcohol addict, went “crazy” murdering Jack Reid didn’t matter. Prosecutors could twist the facts and have witnesses say whatever the state wanted, convincing an unsuspecting jury of the prosecutors’ fabricated case. New Hampshire State Police never even so much as investigated Jesse’s irrefutable whereabouts on the day of the so-called “conspiracy meeting” in Nevada – the keystone of the supposed case - and never subpoenaed his cell tower records which would have clearly shown that a meeting never took place. Instead three years of nonstop pretrial publicity that included roughly 1,000 newspaper articles, radio reports and television segments - most of which were shaped by the prosecutors’ case narrative, reinforced public perception of a sensational murder-for-hire story involving a “millionaire’s son.” However, this fictional case narrative was based solely on statements of witnesses working with the state and lacked any shred of credible evidence. Prosecutor Janice Rundles fostered the “evil rich” theme throughout Jesse’s trial every step of the way and, sadly, his lawyers did little to stop it. At times when witnesses didn’t say what the prosecutors wanted, they misread testimony into the record or broke the rules of evidence and had witnesses recite unsubstantiated out-of-court statements. And, tragically for Jesse, again, no objection was offered by Jesse’s lawyers.
Jesse’s lawyers also failed to present evidence that could prove Jesse’s innocence, failed to call any exculpatory witnesses, failed to present evidence of police misconduct and witness intimidation, the destruction of evidence or police searches conducted without warrants, and failed to expose the many inconsistencies of law enforcement on the stand. Janice Rundles used the gross failures of counsel to her advantage, claiming that Jesse’s lawyers had accepted the state’s testimony as fact because they didn’t challenge it during closing arguments - therefore setting the false statements in stone. By sitting on their hands and failing to dispute the state’s case, Jesse’s lawyers, had effectively, become part of the state’s team to convict Jesse. And perhaps most troubling, 10 weeks before his trial commenced, one of his lawyers made the maximum financial contribution to the U.S. Senate campaign of Attorney General Kelly Ayotte - the very person who INDICTED Jesse