NO RECOMPENSE FOR INJUSTICE

As so often happens lately, Michael Anthony Williams is lost. The driver's license examiner towers over him, rattling off orders through the rolled-down window on the driver's side. But at each command, Williams, 40, hesitates. He signals to the left when he is told to turn right. He forgets to turn off the windshield wipers. He fails the test, another blow in Williams' quest to put together a life that was taken from him when he was just a boy. At the age of 16, a sophomore in Jonesboro High School in northern Louisiana, he was arrested and convicted of raping his female math tutor. He spent 24 years in the Angola state penitentiary. Two months ago, he walked free. A DNA test -- which didn't exist when he was growing up -- proved what Williams had claimed all along: the state had gotten the wrong man.

Now, like dozens of others wrongfully accused and subsequently exonerated, a bewildered, once-young man finds himself, without resources, thrown into a world with which he is entirely unfamiliar. Tasks that are second nature for most adults -- using a cell phone, leaving a voice message, going to an ATM, paying the phone bill or turning on a blinker -- for Williams are pieces of a puzzle he has yet to figure out. "I got to find a new life," says Williams, a heavyset man who was an inside linebacker on his prison football team. A black skullcap covers his receding hairline; a key to his apartment hangs on a ribbon strung around his neck. "It's not gonna be easy. It's not gonna be fast."

Williams is one of 159 people who have been jailed and then freed in the United States through post-conviction DNA testing since it became available in 1989, according to the Innocence Project, a national group that works on preventing and reversing wrongful convictions. Justice may have been served, but in most cases these people have lost virtually everything they ever owned.

Almost half suffer from depression, anxiety disorder or some form of post- traumatic stress disorder, according to a study by Lola Vollen, director of the DNA Identification Technology and Human Rights Center in Berkeley. None has access to public services such as health insurance, job training and anger management that are routinely available to ex-convicts on parole to help their transition back into society. Some states, including California, award financial compensation to the wrongfully convicted. Compensation packages vary from state to state, and in California reach $100 per day of incarceration. But Louisiana, where 18 people have been exonerated since 1989, has no compensation for people such as Williams. Upon his release, the state of Louisiana cut Williams a check for $10. He keeps it in a frame on his coffee table.

"They are expected to jump right in and pick up their lives where supposedly they left them off," said Ernest Duff, who heads the Berkeley-based Life After Exoneration program. "But after being institutionalized like that it's very, very hard to move forward." Like most exonerated inmates, Williams, who finished high school in prison, has no marketable job experience and few social skills. Unlike most others, Williams had almost no contact with the outside world during the years he was inside. His mother died when he was 12. Both of his grandparents, who brought him up, and his father died while he was in prison. His four brothers and two sisters stopped calling, writing or visiting him in 1990. During the last 15 years of his imprisonment, Williams' only visitors were his lawyers from the Innocence Project......

On Wednesday, he saw someone lock the car using a remote control for the first time. Yellow "Support Our Troops" ribbons on cars surprise him. Angola inmates didn't talk much about the war in Iraq. "We had our own war in there," Williams says with a quiet laugh, massaging the scar near his left elbow, where an inmate stabbed him with an ice pick. Surviving 24 years in Angola, one of the nation's most notoriously violent prisons, is a memory Williams prefers not to share. He describes his time there simply as "terrible."

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