EXONEREE JOHN WHITE MARKS FIRST YEAR OF FREEDOM
A Year of Struggle

By Lisa George, Georgia Innocence Project Communications Director
December 10, 2008 - (ATLANTA)

For John White, the last year has been much like everyone else’s: filled with successes and failures, wins and losses, and a lot of days when even breaking even seems like a victory. But for John, this year has been markedly different from several before: for these 365 days, he has been free.

On December 10, 2007, John walked out of Macon State Prison, a life sentence falling off his shoulders as he walked into his mother’s arms. DNA testing obtained by the Georgia Innocence Project (GIP) proved that John was not the man who had, nearly 30 years ago, raped and beat an elderly woman who lived in his small Georgia town. John White no longer has to wear the uniform of a prisoner and the mantle of a brutal sex criminal.

But there are other things still weighing on him, and the past year has been filled with struggle.

“I can look back, and there’s a mental thing about where I came from and where I’m at now. Then, it seemed like there was someone there all the time. In the penitentiary, you knew what you had to do and the consequences if you didn’t,” says John. “Out here in the world, it’s like there ain’t no repercussions behind not doing something, so I really don’t hold interest so much in things.”

Through GIP’s Life After Exoneration program, John got a job at an Atlanta supermarket, and he and his wife moved to Atlanta. But John quit the job after a few weeks because, he says, “It was so hard when I was (in prison), to be up under the pressure of being guarded and facing punishment at every turn. Now it’s hard for me to look at a work supervisor and not think the same way, and it’s not a comfortable feeling.”

The problem isn’t that John doesn’t want to work. In the first few weeks after his release from prison, he spent many days clearing his mother’s land. “Working down at my mom’s house in the woods, completing tasks like that makes me happy, and it’s pleasing myself, because I can look back and see the outcome of it.”

GIP loaned John the money to buy yard equipment and a trailer. He is repaying the “microfinance” loan $10 a week. And until the weather turned cold and the economy turned sour, John had a few months of money in his pocket and a sense of pride at the end of each work day.

But at least for now, his dream of starting a real lawn care business seems a faraway goal. All his profits go to paying his rent and car expenses, and he knows he needs more skills: “It’s difficult, not knowing anything about business except the laboring part.”

John also labors under the challenges he faces in rebuilding his entire life, and it is hard to for him to see the progress he has made in the past year. “Sometimes when I sit down and think about it, I want to do things, but it’s hard to take steps in new directions.”

But John has taken steps, many of them difficult: he has re-established relationships with his family members, he has managed to survive in a big city, and he has participated in months of counseling – adapting to a new world. John is one of 225 Americans who have been exonerated by DNA evidence after spending years in prison, and he has fared better than many exonerees after release.

John credits the Georgia Innocence Project for the progress he has made, saying, “The Life After Exoneration program has done so much for me, and I can’t ask anything else of GIP. It’s time for me to do my part in paying back.”

Characteristically, it is hard right now for John to see that he is already doing that. John has told his story dozens of times through the media, to church groups, to college and law classes. He says he wants to continue that work: “I want to tell my story more and affect someone’s life that may be going in the wrong direction.”

John says the past 365 days have been a struggle to find his own direction, but he’s not giving up.

“It’s been hard, but I’ve got to say that all of it’s been good. I’m living, I’ve got my health, and it would be wrong for me to deny the fact that life is good, and freedom is even better.”

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GEORGIA MAN PROVEN INNOCENT BY DNA EVIDENCE
IN 28-YEAR-OLD RAPE CASE
TESTING ALSO REVEALS IDENTITY OF NEW SUSPECT

 Atlanta – December 11, 2007

DNA test results have ruled out John White as the perpetrator of a rape for which he was convicted in 1980. White, 48, of Manchester, Georgia, has maintained his innocence of the crime for nearly three decades.

Through the efforts of the Georgia Innocence Project (GIP), the Georgia Bureau of Investigation (GBI) performed DNA testing that proves Mr. White is innocent of the crime. Mr. White was released from Macon State Prison on the evening of December 10, 2007. Said Mr. White last week when GIP representatives informed him of the results of the DNA test, “It’s hard to express it, but I feel good, relieved.”

Hairs from the crime scene were matched to White during the investigation by microscopic analysis, the best technology available at the time. DNA testing of those hairs has now proven that they do not belong to Mr. White. A GBI comparison of the test results to files in the Combined DNA Index System (CODIS) reveal the hairs actually belong to another man who is now under investigation.

Mr. White was convicted in Meriwether County of rape, aggravated assault, burglary and robbery for an attack on an elderly woman in her home in August 1979. The court sentenced Mr. White to life in prison. When he was paroled in 1990 as a convicted sex offender, Mr. White’s life began a downward spiral that culminated in convictions for drug possession and robbery, crimes Mr. White admits that he committed. These subsequent convictions caused Mr. White’s parole to be revoked, and he was returned to prison to serve his full life sentence.

Having gone to prison for the rape when he was 20 years old, Mr. White says, “I was raised on the chain gang, and I didn’t know how to make my way once I got out.” Along with Mr. White’s family, the Georgia Innocence Project’s Life After Exoneration program will now work to help him make the transition back to society. Mr. White says, now that he is exonerated of a brutal crime and relieved of the sex offender status he has carried for nearly 30 years, he is determined to rebuild his life.

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