Jones served as a Municipal Court judge in Athens-Clarke County from 1993 to 1995. In 1995, GovernorZell Miller appointed Jones to be a Georgia Superior Court judge for the Western Judicial Circuit, which includes Clarke and Oconee counties.
Awaiting a decision in a Louisiana abortion case pending before the U.S. Supreme Court,in October 2019 Jones issued a temporary injunction against enforcement of a new Georgia law regulating abortions that was to go into effect January 1, 2020. The law is one of the nation’s strictest as it outlaws abortion in most cases once fetal cardiac activity can be detected. After the U.S. Supreme Court ruling struck down the Louisiana abortion law, on July 13, 2020, Jones issued his final order striking down the Georgia law, finding the statute violated a woman’s constitutional right to access to abortion as established by the 1973 U.S. Supreme Court ruling in Roe v. Wade. Jones wrote, “It is in the public interest, and is this court’s duty, to ensure constitutional rights are protected.” The ruling reinstated Georgia's previous statute passed in 2012 allowing abortions through 20 weeks of gestation, or approximately 22 weeks of pregnancy. A spokesman for the Georgia Attorney General’s Office said the state would appeal the ruling. On December 17, 2019, Jones appeared in multiple news headlines after declining in an interlocutory order to stop a purge of 309,000 Georgia voters from the state's list of registered voters. Jones later found that plaintiff Fair Fight Action and other plaintiffs had not shown that they were likely to prevail on the question of constitutionality, but wrote that the State of Georgia was required to conduct “additional diligent and reasonable efforts” to make people aware of the need of canceled voters to re-register, and that the plaintiffs could seek “emergency relief” utilizing a state court that was better suited to deal with the matter. Georgia is one of nine states with a law allowing voters to be removed from the list of registered voters for inactivity, under the latest statute anyone who has three years of voting inactivity followed by non-voting in two federal election cycles and then failing to respond to a notice mailed out by the secretary of state’s office being eligible for removal. However Republican Secretary of State for Georgia, Brad Raffensperger was purging voters years before the legal deadline set in the new legislation based on a prior statute. Lawyers for Fair Fight Action contested this purge, and Fair Fight's CEO Lauren Groh-Wargo argued, "Georgians should not lose their right to vote simply because they have not expressed that right in recent elections." Articles by The Atlanta Journal-Constitution added in context that Fair Fight Action has also been challenging other obstacles that have previously prevented Georgia voters from being able to vote including rejections of absentee ballots, long lines at the polls, and precinct closures that have disproportionately harmed the ability of African Americans to vote in prior years, which could have prevented voters from voting previously and resulted in their placement on the inactive voters list. The list of past voters that Jones did not enjoin from being purged does not have any included data regarding racial disparities among the affected voters.
