A sentence too close to death

I'm far from the only one who lost decades of my life wrongfully imprisoned. Dozens like me have been exonerated by DNA or other new evidence. Just last week, 56-year-old Willie Earl Green was released in Los Angeles after the sole eyewitness in his case recanted. He'd done 24 years of a 33-year-to-life sentence at San Quentin.

I was 18 years old in 1985 when the police in South L.A. arrested me for a double homicide and rape. I was interrogated for 17 excruciating hours, handcuffed to a chair and denied food and water. The police claimed that they had evidence proving my guilt. I was young and scared and desperate to stop the abuse -- so I told the police what they wanted to hear. I was wrongfully convicted based on that coerced confession and the false testimony of a jailhouse informant.

The jury sentenced me to life in prison without parole. Some might say I was lucky; I had escaped the executioner's needle.

But after spending nearly 20 years in a living hell, I can't really see it that way. No matter which prison I was in -- Lancaster, Folsom, Corcoran -- I was under constant surveillance, stripped of any privacy or autonomy. I was at the mercy of the prison guards, who could make my life as miserable as they wished. I lived in constant fear of prison lockdowns, which could last for months; we would not be allowed out of our cells and could take only "bird baths" in the cell sink.

I refused to let my family visit me. Contact with the outside world had become unbearable. I didn't want to hear stories of family outings or other outside news. That life was over unless I could prove my innocence. I had not been sentenced to execution, but I had been sentenced to die in prison.

Because I was sentenced to life without parole, exoneration was my only chance for release. I repeatedly asked for DNA testing of the evidence in my case, but for years my request was denied by the courts. In 2003, a court looked again at the jailhouse informant and granted me a new trial. As a result, the DNA evidence was finally tested, proving my innocence. In 2004, I was finally free.