Georgia Innocence Project
Before the state of Georgia gave him a million dollars and before he lost it all, Clarence Harrison was convicted of rape and robbery and sentenced to life in prison in 1987. Years passed. His wife divorced him. He became estranged from his two young daughters. His mother died. He got cancer and had a kidney removed. He lost hope. He stopped communicating with everybody on the outside. He resigned himself to spending the rest of his life behind bars and being buried in the prison cemetery, which inmates called Pissant Hill.
Then in 2004, 18 years after he was arrested, a DNA test proved that he was innocent.
Harrison and his lawyers believed that the process to get him released would take up to two more years. There were prosecutors to fight and motions to file, and that was how long the process had taken for other innocent inmates.
A week after the DNA test, Harrison was transported three and a half hours from Smith State Prison to the DeKalb County Courthouse in Decatur. He assumed it was for a routine evidentiary hearing. Then the judge said he was free to go.
Cameras and reporters waited for him on the courthouse steps. Microphones surrounded him and he spoke the first thought that came to his mind:. "The first thing I'd like to do is get my job," he said, because he hoped to marry the woman he had met and fallen in love with while he was incarcerated "as soon as I can get a job and earn the money to buy the ring."
The exoneration was a lead story in the local news. People all around the greater Atlanta metropolitan area stepped forward to donate suits, dresses, flowers, and a wedding ring. Less than three weeks after he walked out of that courthouse, Clarence Harrison was married in a church in downtown Atlanta in a ceremony paid for by strangers and filled with people he barely remembered and people he had never met, all there with smiles and well wishes.
Eight months later, the Georgia legislature passed a bill to award Harrison $1 million for his wrongful imprisonment. It was the first time the state had ever offered to compensate an exoneree.
Harrison moved into his wife’s house in Marietta, 20 miles north of Atlanta. A board member of the Georgia Innocence Project offered Harrison a job at the bookstore she ran. A musician released an album inspired by Harrison’s experience. One local pastor described his exoneration as, “a story that shows God’s transformative justice in making things right.” It is a story that has been on the front page of the Atlanta Journal Constitution, on Good Day Atlanta, on Al Jazeera, on CNN.
Clarence Harrison had love, money, and freedom. He was the star of a real-life fairy tale.
“That’s that happy ending part,” Harrison said.
He did the media circuit for a while, but soon the attention faded away. Reporters stopped calling. There were new injustices and redemptions to cover. But when the lights turn off, an exoneree’s struggle is just beginning. And all that happened over the next decade — Harrison refers to it as “the story they don’t hear.”
In the story they don’t hear, the $1 million is gone, the future annuity checks aren’t coming, Harrison is jobless and depressed and broke, can’t get disability payments, owes the government tens of thousands of dollars in taxes, and has no idea how to get his life back on track.
“Ain’t no justice in my release if I’m going through what I’m going through,” he said. “They don’t understand. People shy away from that stuff. People don’t wanna hear that. They want the Cinderella. They don’t understand there is tragedy behind it. I can’t tell ‘em how good I feel to be out. I don’t feel good about being free.”
Albert Samaha / BuzzFeed News
People didn’t want to hear about his life before the arrest, Harrison believed, and so he didn’t tell people about it. He was the second youngest of 10 kids, raised by a single mother who worked as a housekeeper. He didn’t really know his father, who died when he was 7.
“Only two memories I have of him,” Harrison said. “One was in the kitchen pouring liquor, and the other was at the card table.”
Harrison got kicked out of four high schools. After dropping out, he supported himself by stealing clothes from department stores and selling them on the street. At 18, he got married, had a daughter, and moved the family into an apartment, out of which he ran a gambling den to pay the rent.
One night, while 18-year-old Harrison and a few friends were out on a beer run, one of the friends pulled out a gun and robbed a woman. They were all arrested, and Harrison spent the next six years in prison for armed robbery. Back out at 24, he had another daughter and vowed to turn straight. He worked construction, then tarring roads for DeKalb County. He cashed his checks as soon as he got them, and stored his savings at home.
“I was happy,” he said. “I worked. I provided.”
Less than three years into his new life, he was arrested for rape and robbery, and this is where the fairy tale begins.
Harrison, who is 55 and walks with a cane, speaks softly and with poise, and in the same conversational drawl before a roomful of law students as on a barstool around old friends. He likes to weave in the details. Speaking on a panel at Emory University in February, he recalled that on the night of the crime he had been playing poker, then tossed in a digression about how much he loved to gamble and how when he was in prison nobody was sending him money but he survived by winning snacks and weed and cash in card games. He noted that the victim, who identified him as the culprit, was so-and-so’s boyfriend’s sister. And he described the moment the judge read the guilty verdict, how he looked around the courtroom in a daze.
“I’m still looking for that superhero that’s gon’ correct it,” Harrison said. “But he didn’t come. And when I looked around for my superhero, I saw my mama’s face and she was crying.”
At its heart, though, the story Harrison tells audiences is a love story, one that just happens to be bookended by a wrongful conviction and an exoneration. A fellow inmate had phoned his girlfriend but her mother picked up and was giving him a hard time. So, in a rush to get off the line, he passed the phone to Harrison and asked him to occupy her. The conversation sparked something between them, and soon Yvonne was mailing him letters.
By the time he first spoke to Yvonne, Harrison had already given up hope. He had appealed his conviction only to learn that all the evidence in his case had been destroyed because DeKalb County had a policy of cleaning out its evidence rooms by dumping files after seven years. The DNA that had been in the file had been deemed contaminated and therefore untestable. The news broke Harrison.
“I just accepted the fact that I was never gonna come out and be in society again,” he told the students. “And at that point I stopped communicating with my family. I wouldn’t let them write, wouldn’t let them visit me. I wouldn’t call anybody. I didn’t wanna have any part of the so-called free world. I wanted to accept that that’s where I was gonna live and die, in prison. So I shed the outside world. And I stopped trying to fight.”
But Yvonne encouraged him to keep fighting. She read his trial transcript and told him she believed he was innocent. She took a third job to pay for his lawyer, but the lawyer couldn't make any progress on the case. She did some research and persuaded him to write to the Georgia Innocence Project. Aimee Maxwell, the nonprofit’s executive director, and her two staff members took on his case.
One of Maxwell’s lawyers visited the county evidence room, looked through Harrison’s file, and found a brown paper bag containing a single slide of DNA evidence that nobody had noticed before. They sent the slide for testing, and the lab discovered that the sample was indeed testable, and that it belonged to somebody other than Harrison. Police never found who the DNA belonged to, and the crime was never solved. But the District Attorney’s Office agreed that the evidence proved Harrison’s innocence, and next thing you know Clarence and Yvonne Harrison were standing at the altar in Atlanta’s most celebrated wedding of 2004.
“Any place we would go in the city people would go up and talk to him,” Maxwell, who was also on the panel, told the audience. “His story has inspired people.”
Donations covered every bit of the ceremony, and the honeymoon too.
“The entire city of Atlanta — it’s one of the most inspirational things of the whole story — the city of Atlanta came together,” Maxwell said. “He’s still married. They’re still sort of like 14-year-old kids in love.”
Courtesy of Clarence Harrison
By Clarence Harrison’s estimate, he has told his fairy tale “hundreds of times.” It's a kind of story that is getting ever more familiar.
In the three decades since his arrest, it became clear that wrongful convictions were more common than most Americans ever imagined. In 1986, no conviction had ever been overturned because of DNA evidence and exonerations were so uncommon that no organization had bothered to keep track of them. But after the first DNA-based exoneration in 1989, there was a growing body of evidence that eyewitnesses were sometimes wrong, confessions were sometimes false, and an untold number of innocent people had been locked up in the push to get tough on crime. Fifty-seven people were exonerated the year Harrison was freed. In 2012, 92 people were exonerated, and 91 more were exonerated in 2013, according to data collected by the National Registry of Exonerations. In 2014, there were 126 exonerations. Every year there are more Clarence Harrisons.
As the number of exonerees has grown, state legislatures have moved to pass statutes that guarantee financial compensation for the years of wrongful imprisonment. In 1986, five states had compensations laws on the books. In 2006, 11 did. By the end of 2014, 30 states had such policies. Across the board, there is almost no disagreement over whether states should give money to exonerees — the debate is simply a matter of scope, of how much to pay and of how to close loopholes that might send money to guilty people freed on legal technicalities.
Different states treat their exonerees differently. For his 39 years of wrongful imprisonment in Ohio, Ricky Jackson got a total of $1 million, or around just $25,600 per year. The Central Park Five, who each spent between seven and 13 years locked up, received $1 million per year of imprisonment in a settlement with New York City. Texas, widely praised for having the most benevolent compensation policy, gives exonerees $80,000 for each year of incarceration. New Hampshire caps total payments at $20,000. Other states don’t offer compensation if an exoneree pleaded guilty, or unless they were freed by DNA evidence.
Twenty states have no compensation laws. In those states, an exoneree’s only paths to restitution are to sue the state, or, as in Georgia, to lobby for an individual bill granting compensation. All in all just two-thirds of DNA exonerees receive compensation, and the rate is even lower for those who were exonerated without DNA.
“This whole social phenomenon of wrongfully convicted people is a relatively new phenomenon,” said Marla Mitchell-Cichon, a professor at Western Michigan University’s Cooley Law School. “And we’re still struggling as a society and in the law to figure this out.”
Even most states that provide compensation offer nothing beyond money. While a person on parole usually gets job training, psychological counseling, financial guidance, and perhaps a bed at a halfway house, almost all exonerees receive no support as they leap into the icy waters of the free world. The transition can be overwhelming, and an exoneree is left on his own to get his life back in order. There are the nightmares, the waking up terrified of being back in prison. There’s the adjustment to physical contact, a sign of aggression on the inside but of comfort on the outside. There’s the anger, always lingering in the back of the mind, for the years taken away. There’s the fear of never being able to fully rejoin society.
Joseph Frey, who spent 11 years in prison in Wisconsin before his exoneration in 2005, lived in a homeless shelter for weeks after his release. Ken Wyniemko, who did a nine-year bid in Michigan before his exoneration in 2003, couldn’t find a job, and when a bowling alley owner was about to hire him, employees threatened to quit because they weren’t convinced he was innocent. Calvin Johnson spent 16 years in prison in Georgia before his exoneration in 1999. Lacking a credit history because of his time in prison, when he tried to rent an apartment, the property manager told him he had to pay triple the security deposit.
Nationwide the vague idea of “criminal justice reform” has emerged as a front-page domestic policy issue, and within that conversation the specific idea of compensating exonerees has emerged as a priority. In Georgia, Harrison is the face of this movement, and there has been an increasing demand for his voice. Over a two-week stretch in February, Harrison had five speaking engagements, all unpaid, not counting the ones he had to turn down because he couldn’t get a ride.
He didn’t mention the million dollars in any of them. During the Q&A portion of the Emory event, a student asked whether exonerees like Harrison could get any money for the years they lost. Harrison didn’t speak up, so Maxwell took the question. She explained that, though Georgia has no compensation statute, the state legislature can pass individual bills to award exonerees $50,000 for every year they spent in prison, and that’s what Harrison got: $1 million in total, handed down in yearly annuity payments from 2006 to 2024. Then she rattled off the policy changes she and other advocates were pushing for.
That evening, back home in Marietta, Harrison thought back to that moment in the event and said, “When he asked that question, about the money, I wanted to tell him so bad about what it’s really been like, but I couldn’t.”
Albert Samaha / BuzzFeed News
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