Man wrongfully imprisoned for decades happy to start relearning life

[MrScorpio]

By Rich Phillips, CNN
May 25, 2010 7:54 a.m. EDT



Tampa, Florida (CNN) -- Meeting 54-year-old James Bain, the one thing that stands out is that the smile never seems to leave his face. He appears happy and positive, and the bitterness that might be buried inside a man who was wrongly sent to prison for 35 years is nowhere to be found.

"I kind of see myself as a man of God and being like Joseph," he said.

"In a sense, I feel like a bear, coming out of hibernation. Like, they come out to eat, mine would be coming out to enjoy what I have missed."

Bain has missed a lot. His life was returned to him and his family in December, when a Florida judge freed him after DNA testing proved he did not kidnap and rape a 9-year-old boy in 1974 in Lake Wales, Florida.

With the help of the Innocence Project, a national public policy organization dedicated to exonerating wrongfully convicted people through DNA tests, Bain left a Florida courtroom and entered a world he had left a lifetime ago. He is now on the outside, in a world that has changed technologically and socially, and one in which he must now learn how to live -- again.

"I've been planning on going back to school, and getting ready to take my driving test again, and hoping to get a motorcycle license," Bain said.

In the backyard of his mother's home in Tampa, Florida, Bain said that he'd like to tour the country on his motorcycle. CNN spoke with him amidst grapefruit and orange trees that weren't even planted when he went to prison so many years ago.

"You spend 35 years in prison, and just the little things, like a grapefruit tree or an orange tree ... those had vanished for me," he said. "I never thought I'd get a chance to see another one of these."


The Rest: http://www.cnn.com/2010/CRIME/05/24/life.after.prison/index.html?hpt=C1