Dreams Deferred?
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.
