Exonerated after 25 years, freedom feels good
No bitterness taints first 6 months of being on the outside

by David Markiewicz , The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, June 4, 2006

When the question comes up — and how can it not? — Robert Clark is ready.

Yeah, he's the guy. The proof is right there in the trunk of his silver 2005 Ford Taurus, next to a pile of clothes. A front-page article from The Atlanta Journal-Constitution. A mention in Jet magazine.

Robert Clark enjoys 'just being able to get in my car. ... Turn on the radio. Smoke me a cigarette. And just drive.' Photo by Rich Addicks/AJC

"DNA absolves inmate of 1981 rape. Release in works." So the headlines go.

Clark carries around the 6-month-old clippings like a passport — letters of transit in a world he left 25 years ago when he was wrongly convicted in Cobb County and given a life sentence.

The details still haunt him. A woman is abducted from the parking lot of a Kentucky Fried Chicken in East Atlanta on a hot summer night. The abductor takes her to Cobb where he beats and rapes her.

A week later Clark is spotted in the woman's car. He says he got it from a friend. The cops charge him with possession of a stolen vehicle, but when the victim IDs him from photos and a lineup as her attacker he's up on a rape charge. A jury says guilty. Clark's sent away.

In 2003, the New York-based Innocence Project takes up Clark's case and uses DNA testing to prove he didn't do it. A few weeks before Christmas, 2005, he's set free.

Now, it's nearly six months to the day of his exoneration, and Robert Clark, 45, is back on the street trying to make something of a life that suffered the strangest of interludes.

Re-entry hasn't been all smooth. Still, he's got his car, so he can go anyplace he wants anytime he wants. And he's got a job, even if it means working the graveyard shift.

Got an apartment, too. It's just a three-month lease, but it will get him out of his late mother's old house. He's also got a lot of people — counselors, lawyers, financial experts — trying to help him sort things out.

Which may be why Robert Clark, free man, smiles the gleamiest of smiles when he tells you he really doesn't mind repeating his amazing story. Doesn't take offense when people ask, "You really him?"

Hey, it even helps him with the ladies.

"They can't believe they're talking to the guy who served 24 years," he says. So, "I show them the newspaper article, or the Jet magazine thing."

And ...

"It helps me," he says, laughing loudly. "It hasn't scared them off yet."

Behind bars at age 21

What you have to remember, Lisa George is saying, is that Robert Clark got put away when he was only 21 years old, and an eighth-grade dropout at that.

George, the spokesperson for the Georgia Innocence Project, isn't trying to lower expectations for Clark's life after prison, she's just trying to be realistic. Everybody wants good things for a man who had his youth taken from him. Who didn't get to raise his two children, Rocky and Samantha. Whose devoted mother never got to see her son walk out a free man.

Especially one as polite, as soft-spoken as Clark.

But when you've got a limited education and are stuck in a circa 1981 time warp, adjusting isn't always easy.

Case in point: When he got out, the first thing Clark wanted to do was buy a car. He picked up a $500 junker that promptly quit on him. Lesson learned.

Came time to find an apartment and buy a better car and Robert learned he was "a ghost." A credit ghost, that is, somebody with no credit history, which is worse than having a bad history.

George and others involved in the Georgia Innocence Project's "Life After Exoneration" program got him established, but some practicalities still elude him. Like the difference between credit cards and debit cards. Or how to go about renting a truck to haul furniture to his new apartment.

Clark is a work in progress.

"He's doing well," she says, "all things considered."

Grateful to be working

"I'm used to being independent. I'm used to taking care of myself."

Clark says this and perhaps it explains why, in the days after his release, he went out on his own and found a job when a cadre of supporters were trying to help him do just that.

The work, detailing charter buses, isn't glamorous and the pay isn't much, but he's grateful.

"I like it. It keeps my mind busy," he says. "They gave me a chance."

He works 10 p.m. to 7 a.m. and that makes it hard to sleep. It does allow him to make his medical and other appointments and even leaves time to ferry his five grandchildren and others around his Atlanta neighborhood to school and to work.

His boss, Cortez Jones, president of DirtBusters Fleet Services in East Point, was immediately sold on Clark.

"The guy went through a lot," Jones says. "When he came looking for a job and told me who he was, I said, 'Look, man, you don't have to go any further.' I felt society owes him something."