Here are some more ugly details of former Kentucky Governor Matt Bevin’s commutation of rapist Dayton Jones. Trigger Warning for anyone who is a rape survivor.
First up, some background. Dayton Jones plead guilty to sodomizing with a sex toy a passed out 15 year old boy at a party. Jones posted online a video that was taken of the rape. The victim had to have emergency surgery to save his life from the bowel perforation that occured during the rape. Jones had served three years of his sentence when Republican Governor Matt Bevin reviewed Jones case and commuted his sentence in December of 2019.
Bevin told a pack of lies about his commutation of Jones’ sentence.
Justifying his commutation of Dayton Jones' sentence in a brutal sodomy, Gov. Matt Bevin said the only evidence implicating Jones came from co-defendants trying to get leniency for the near-fatal assault on an unconscious 15-year-old boy.
Bevin told The Courier Journal last month that he had read “hundreds of documents” from the case and that “there was nothing there except for the testimony of kids who were getting a better deal by throwing” Jones “under the bus.”
Bevin insisted there was no corroborating evidence — “zero, zero” — adding that if Jones, 25, had been “even remotely involved,” he wouldn’t have received the commutation.
But a Courier Journal review of the case shows that Bevin was wrong — other witnesses besides Jones' co-defendants implicated him. Indeed, Jones implicated himself.
According to court records, Jones sent a text message from his phone the morning after the 2014 assault, admitting he inserted a sex toy into the victim's anus “a little, but I was for sure not the only one. Everybody did it.”
Yeah, besides taking a video and posting it for all to see, Jones sent a text message to another young man admitting he did it.