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They Took My Life

His wrongful arrest led to 12 years in jail. David Shephard can't make up for the lost time -- but he's determined to try.

Fear of Freedom

The euphoria washed over David Shephard the instant he walked out of prison, and didn't let up for hours, not until he finally collapsed from exhaustion, safe back in his mother's house. But after spending so much time in jail, Shephard had changed -- and so had his world. Within days the exhilaration of freedom vanished, replaced by a crippling paranoia that dogged him all day, every day. <br><br> For weeks he couldn't leave the house. When he finally did venture out, he made sure to save his bus ticket in case he had to prove where he had been. "I wanted to get back to my life," Shephard says, "but I was afraid it could all happen again." <br><br> If you stop and think about it, Shephard's paranoia is understandable. Wrongly convicted of raping a 19-year-old New Jersey woman, he spent 12 years behind bars, until an advanced DNA analysis proved his innocence. After all he'd been through -- arrested at work, ripped from his future wife and baby son, jailed for a third of his life -- starting over wasn't as easy as walking out of a cell. Nine years after his release, Shephard, now 41, is still trying to shake the notion that if it happened once, it could happen again. <br><br> To date, 143 U.S. prison inmates have had convictions overturned using DNA evidence, including 13 on death row. While these exonerations have exposed deficiencies in the judicial system, they also make an old truism painfully clear: Nothing can make up for lost time. There's simply no amount of money or job support or training or counseling that can guarantee a smooth re-entry for an innocent man who's been jailed for years. <br><br> "Prison can make healthy people literally insane. Most prisoners assume that when they get out, they'll be able to just step back into their old lives," says Dr. Laurie Vollen, a forensic scientist who is developing the first national support network for the wrongly convicted. "But they come out to nothing. If they're lucky, they'll get bus fare and a newspaper headline." <br><br> David Shephard hardly had a fair shot in the first place. His father took off before he was born. To support her three children, his mother worked a double shift as a cellular telephone operator. When Shephard was a high school junior, he dropped out to take care of his baby sister, Nataly. He'd been a good student, taking advanced classes, but he took the adjustment in stride. "I tried to make the most of my free time," he says. "I was never one to sit around." He volunteered for a local community policing program, where he met his wife, Erica Calloway, a fellow volunteer. She fell for him instantly. "David was different from the others," she says. "He was a real charmer. He was charismatic." <br><br> Shortly after the two began dating, Shephard landed a job on a ramp crew servicing planes at Newark International Airport. By the fall of 1983, when he was 20, he'd moved up to head the graveyard shift, and Erica had just given birth to their son, LeMarr. The couple were making plans to buy a house. "We were building a future," Erica says. <br><br> One morning in late December, Shephard clocked out after his shift and then headed to his car. A couple of Hillside, New Jersey detectives stopped him. They wanted to talk about a stolen vehicle. He rode with them to the police station -- the first one he had ever been in -- where the officers began pressuring him to confess not only to the car theft but to a sexual assault. They told him that a young white woman had been abducted on Christmas Eve by two black men outside the Woodbridge Mall, south of the airport. They forced her into her car and drove to a quiet area, where they beat and raped her before leaving her by the side of the road. <br><br>

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