Ronald Jacobsen

The Crime

Shortly after 4 a.m. on Jan. 6, 1990, a 21-year-old woman was kidnapped from a Golden Pantry convenience store in Covington, Georgia. The woman, who was identified as B.T., would later recount a harrowing tale of being sexually assaulted repeatedly over the next 90 minutes.

Initially, her attacker drove north on Interstate 20 toward Atlanta, she said. He drove out of Newton County and into two neighboring counties. She said he forced her to engage in oral sex while driving and stopped on several occasions in Rockdale County to sexually assault her. Finally, at around 5:30 a.m. in DeKalb County, the truck ran out of gas. B.T. said that after the attacker left her alone while he went to find gasoline, she ran to a nearby house for help. 

Police were summoned, but by the time they arrived, the truck was gone.

The Investigation

The woman was taken to a hospital where a rape kit was prepared and she was treated for cuts and bruises which she said were sustained when the man beat her in the truck. She said the last time she had engaged in consensual sex was six days ago — on New Year’s Eve.

At the store, police found a bloody handprint on the wall and a folding knife outside on the ground. Blood tests were performed by the Georgia Bureau of Investigation (GBI) on the knife and swabs of the handprint. The rape kit was examined, but when no sperm were identified in a microscopic screening, no further testing was conducted. At that time, the use of DNA testing was in its infancy — the first DNA exoneration was in 1989 and only two had occurred prior to this crime.

In her initial statement, B.T. told police that a stranger came into the store and abducted her. She said that hours earlier, two men and two women had entered the store and then left. She said that around 4 a.m., one of the men returned alone. He came up to the counter as if to buy cigarettes, but then came behind the counter and threatened her with the knife. B.T. said she felt a stinging sensation on the side of her head and felt blood. She said she was forced to accompany the man into his truck. She said the man was 5 feet 9 inches to 5 feet 10 inches tall and weighed about 165 pounds. B.T. said she had never seen the man before that night.

B.T. also said that someone had been with her in the store that night but had left just as the attacker entered. She said the man could have been Robert Knight. She suggested that police ask Mr. Knight if he had been there with her.

Two days later, on January 8, B.T. was interviewed again and she repeated that her attacker was a stranger. She told police she was unsure if the man had any tattoos. She helped police create a composite sketch. 

On January 9, police and B.T. drove from the store in an attempt to recreate the route the attacker had taken. She again said her attacker was a stranger. She added that at one of the stops during the attack, she thought about trying to escape by fleeing to the home of a friend, Ronald Jacobsen, who lived nearby. 

Mr. Jacobsen, who was 29 years old, had dated B.T. for a few weeks, beginning in September 1989, when Mr. Jacobsen became the roommate of George Hatcher. At that time, Mr. Hatcher was dating B.T.’s mother. When B.T. and Mr. Jacobsen met, B.T. had just been released from the Georgia Mental Health Institute. She had been hospitalized for depression and a suicide attempt after ending a relationship with a different man.

In early December 1989, Mr. Jacobsen stopped seeing B.T. because his girlfriend, who lived in Chattanooga, Tennessee, became pregnant.

Police interviewed B.T.’s father, who said that prior to the crime, B.T. was having trouble with two men named Tony and J.R. He also suggested that police talk to his friend, Robert Knight, who had been in the store with B.T. earlier that night. B.T.’s father had already talked to Mr. Knight and, during those conversations, B.T’s father had mentioned to Mr. Knight that B.T. had had some problems with Mr. Jacobsen.

On January 10, Mr. Knight gave Mr. Jacobsen’s name as a possible suspect. Police pulled a copy of Mr. Jacobsen’s driver’s license photo and decided he resembled the composite sketch. Police showed the photo, which had Mr. Jacobsen’s name on it, to Mr. Knight, who then said that Mr. Jacobsen was the man who entered the Golden Pantry just as Mr. Knight was leaving.

Police met with B.T. the next day and suggested Mr. Jacobsen was her attacker. She said unequivocally that he was not. The police decided she should take a polygraph examination, but when they got to GBI headquarters, the police learned she was pregnant, and the polygraph examiner would not administer the test.

Ultimately, B.T. acquiesced to the police version of the crime and implicated Mr. Jacobsen.

On January 12, police questioned Mr. Jacobsen. He denied any involvement in the crime. He said he had spent the weekend in Chattanooga with his girlfriend, who lived with her mother and her mother’s boyfriend. Police did not record the interrogation. However, a police report was written in the first person as if Mr. Jacobsen had authored it. He was never shown a copy of it to determine its accuracy.

Mr. Jacobsen was arrested that same day. He was charged with aggravated sodomy, kidnapping with bodily injury, and aggravated assault for the crimes in Newton County. He was not charged with any crimes in the other counties.

The Trial

Less than six months later, in June 1990, Mr. Jacobsen — who was charged under the name Ronald Jacobson — went to trial in Newton County Superior Court. The prosecutor acknowledged in his opening statement that the case was problematic, saying that the police “went back to her and kind of told her who it was, and at that point in time she said yes, it was him, and she went and told the whole same story again, but just supplied his name at this point in time.”

The prosecution’s theory was that after B.T. and Mr. Jacobsen stopped dating in early December 1989, Mr. Jacobsen didn’t want to let go. And in fact, he had given B.T. a ring in mid-December, which B.T. had characterized as “like a Christmas present or early Christmas present.”

The prosecution’s case rested on the testimony of Mr. Knight and B.T. No physical or forensic evidence tied Mr. Jacobsen to the crime.

Mr. Knight said that he recognized Mr. Jacobsen as the man he saw come into the store as Mr. Knight was leaving. And for the first time, Mr. Knight said before he left, he asked B.T. if she knew the man. 

“She told me she had been dating him, a former boyfriend I believe is the way she said it,” Mr. Knight testified.

B.T. identified Mr. Jacobsen as her attacker. She said she had not immediately identified him because he had threatened to kill her if she did. Mr. Jacobsen’s defense attorney did not attempt to impeach B.T. with her statements saying that she had considered trying to escape when she was in the neighborhood where Mr. Jacobsen lived. The defense attorney also failed to raise B.T.’s prior mental health issues.

Mr. Jacobsen testified that when he saw B.T. in mid-December shortly after they stopped dating, he gave her the ring because she “was talking suicide” and he knew she had “a history of mental problems.” He said he told her it was “a friendship ring.” When B.T. had expressed an interest in continuing to date, Mr. Jacobsen told her that he couldn’t — his girlfriend was pregnant.

Mr. Jacobsen testified that he felt bad for B.T. She said that no one loved or cared for her. He became aware of her mental health issues when, shortly after they met, B.T.’s mother told him that B.T. had recently left a mental institution.

He said that on Jan. 5, 1990, he was at the home of Gordon Lynn, who was the brother of his roommate, George Hatcher. Mr. Jacobsen said he left from there on the 150-mile drive to Chattanooga, arriving between 10 p.m. and 11 p.m. 

He said he got up the next morning — January 6 — and left between 7 a.m. and 7:30 a.m. Two hours earlier, B.T. had already broken free from her attacker. Mr. Jacobsen said he drove to his job in Atlanta, worked until late afternoon, and then returned to spend the night of January 6 in Chattanooga. 

The prosecutor attempted to impeach him with the police report of his statement, which he had not written or reviewed. The report quoted him as saying that on the night of the crime he was “home.” Mr. Jacobsen explained that he meant his girlfriend’s home. 

Mr. Jacobsen was confronted with references in the police synopsis to his roommate Mr. Hatcher going to work that Saturday morning at 6:45 a.m. and that he believed Mr. Hatcher’s girlfriend (B.T.’s mother) was at the house. The prosecutor contended that Mr. Jacobsen would not have known these facts if he was in Chattanooga. Mr. Jacobsen explained that this was the time Mr. Hatcher usually went to work. He testified he wasn’t just “guessing” that Mr. Hatcher was at work at this time because this was Mr. Hatcher’s routine and his girlfriend was usually over at the house.

Mr. Jacobsen also said he didn’t own a truck or drive anyone else’s truck.

Mr. Jacobsen’s girlfriend, her mother, and her mother’s boyfriend testified that Mr. Jacobsen arrived on Friday night in Chattanooga, and they stayed up until 2:30 a.m. watching television. They said Mr. Jacobsen was out the door by 7:30 a.m. the following morning.

The weekend was memorable in part because Mr. Jacobsen’s girlfriend’s birthday was two days earlier on January 3. When Mr. Jacobsen returned after work on the evening of January 6, he brought her a new car as a present. A friend of the family testified that he saw Mr. Jacobsen in Chattanooga on the morning of January 7.

Mr. Jacobsen worked at PMP Motor Cars Auto Repair in Atlanta. His employer testified that Mr. Jacobsen worked Monday through Saturday from 9:30 a.m. to 4 p.m. with Sundays off. Although there were no timecards, he said Mr. Jacobsen was at work on January 6. He also testified that Mr. Jacobsen had no access to any vehicles at the business — rebutting the prosecution suggestion that Mr. Jacobsen had abducted B.T. in a truck he took from PMP Motor Cars Auto Repair. 

On June 12, 1990, the jury convicted Mr. Jacobsen of aggravated sodomy, kidnapping with bodily injury, and aggravated assault. He was sentenced to life in prison.

In November 1991, the Court of Appeals of Georgia upheld his convictions. 

The Exoneration

In 2003, Georgia passed a statute permitting post-conviction DNA testing. Mr. Jacobsen reached out to the Innocence Project. Due to a heavy backlog of requests, his case was not accepted until 2013. 

In August 2015, after the Newton County District Attorney’s Office refused to consent to the testing, Innocence Project Attorney Vanessa Potkin, joined by the Georgia Innocence Project, filed a motion to obtain such testing. The motion was granted in December 2015.

In March 2017, Ms. Potkin filed an extraordinary motion for a new trial based on the DNA test results that excluded Mr. Jacobsen and identified male DNA that was not linked to anyone else.

District Attorney Layla Zon opposed the motion and made a highly controversial argument that the rape shield law barred the introduction of the DNA evidence. As Ms. Potkin noted in response, the rape shield law is designed to preclude “irrelevant evidence” offered to impugn the character of a sexual assault victim, such as evidence of a reputation for promiscuity. If the rape shield law barred relevant evidence that demonstrated a person’s innocence, it would be unconstitutional, she argued.

On Dec. 18, 2017, Superior Court Judge Eugene Benton agreed with District Attorney Zon and denied the motion for a new trial. 

Just six months earlier, the Court of Appeals of Georgia, in an unrelated case, had addressed the same issue. The court said, “[W]e note potentially serious concerns regarding the notion that the [Rape shield] act is so broad as to exclude all evidence ‘relating to’ a victim’s past sexual behavior with the sole exception being evidence related to activity which included the defendant.”

“In so doing, we contemplate a scenario where the prosecution asserts the Rape Shield Statute to exclude evidence of the DNA results in a fact pattern… where the evidence would be highly probative of innocence, directly related to the honesty of a witness, yet clearly related to the past sexual behavior of the victim,” the court said. “The possibility of this scenario unfolding in a criminal case raises myriad questions related to the Confrontation Clause and Due Process protections of our constitutions. But this is not the case before us.”

Mr. Jacobsen’s legal team appealed Judge Benton’s decision. They noted that Judge Benton’s ruling, if allowed to stand, would result in the “absurd” result in which “DNA evidence would be a tool solely of the prosecution, only to be used where DNA inculpates, but inadmissible where it excludes an accused or convicted person.”

On Jan. 18, 2019, perhaps moved by the 2017 comments by the Court of Appeals of Georgia, District Attorney Zon filed a motion with the appeals court. She asked that the case be remanded to the trial court because she had agreed to an order granting the motion for a new trial. 

But despite agreeing to the new trial, District Attorney Zon refused to dismiss the case. Moreover, Judge Benton refused to set a bond for Mr. Jacobsen. 

More than a year passed, and District Attorney Zon had not taken any steps toward retrying the case. So, in March 2020, Ms. Potkin, joined by Attorneys Donald Samuel and Amanda Clark Palmer from the Atlanta law firm of Garland, Samuel & Loeb, filed an emergency motion for Mr. Jacobsen’s release. The motion cited the ongoing risk of Covid-19 in the prison and the state of Georgia at large. 

In response, District Attorney Zon offered Mr. Jacobsen a deal to plead guilty in return for his immediate release. Mr. Jacobsen turned her down.

Ultimately, Judge Benton finally relented and set a $500,000 bond, requiring Mr. Jacobsen to post $55,000 to obtain his release. Then, in June 2020, District Attorney Zon was appointed to a Superior Court judgeship and her chief deputy, Randy McGinley, was sworn in as her successor.

On Nov. 2, 2020, Mr. Jacobsen’s family finally was able to post the $55,000 bail, and he was released. The following day, Mr. McGinley was elected district attorney. He promised a review of the case.

On Aug. 25, 2021, District Attorney McGinley dismissed the charges.

In 2023, Mr. Jacobsen filed a federal civil-rights lawsuit against two law enforcement officers involved in his wrongful conviction.