By Christinia Asquith

Wrongly imprisoned, Alan Newton advises students in CUNY’s Black Male Initiative. So why is a civil rights group trying to stop him?

NEW YORK
Exhaling a long plume of cold January air, Alan Newton throws open the door of Medgar Evers College in Brooklyn and heads towards his first class of the spring semester. While waiting for the professor to arrive, Newton slips into a desk. He knows something about waiting.
Waiting for justice.

Before he came to Medgar Evers, Newton spent 22 years locked up in 12 different New York state prisons for a crime he didn’t commit. Most of his classmates weren’t born when he stepped into his first prison cell. His ordeal began when a White woman who had been raped in the Bronx mistakenly identified the 22-year-old in a photo lineup.

Last summer, thanks to DNA testing and Newton’s persistent lobbying, he was exonerated and released in the same Bronx jurisdiction where he had been convicted. The judge who reviewed the case didn’t apologize, which “really didn’t matter,” Newton says. He learned long ago how to fight off bitterness and disappointment.

“When I first got in, I was in shock. I was bitter, angry and missing my family,” he says gently, sitting in the library at Medgar Evers. One year into his sentence, his mother passed away. “I realized that if I kept it in, I wouldn’t grow. I had to channel that.”

Coming out of prison after two decades is a challenge; and it is an even greater struggle for those wrongly incarcerated — most of whom are Black. In the past year, DNA testing has freed eight other prisoners in New York state alone. But the state offers no compensation for wrongly imprisoned inmates, and there are no job training programs or housing services in place, as there are for parolees. The struggle to rebuild a life after prison is one shouldered disproportionately by minorities: In 2003, Blacks made up 15 percent of the population of New York state, and 54 percent of the prison population, according to Human Rights Watch.