When Alan Newton was released a year ago after spending 22 years in the clink for a rape he didn’t commit, he didn’t have a plan. He didn’t even have the beginning of one.
The 45-year-old didn’t have a job, a college degree, or a place to stay. His fiancée had “moved on,” and, even if he wanted to, he didn’t know how to use a cellphone to call her.
“I had no list,” Newton told The Post Friday, a year to the day after a Bronx judge set him free after DNA evidence proved another man had raped a 25-year-old woman at a convenience store on June 23, 1984.
“Somebody who is on parole knows when they’re coming home and can plan for it. As an exoneree, you get kicked out the door. I had no list, no intentions. I couldn’t think that far, ’cause I didn’t know if I was coming home.”
So, Newton dealt with his new freedom the only way he knew how – he hit the ground running.
And what a year it has been.
“Last year when he got out, he didn’t know how to hold a cellphone. This year, he’s walking and texting at the same time,” said his brother Ray.
“Now, we’re giving him driving lessons. It’s that old saying, ‘If you could live your life over again. . .’ Well, he has that chance.”
Alan puts it simply.
“I try not to limit myself,” he said, adding that the motto even extends to karaoke.
“If I sing bad in karaoke, it doesn’t even matter – I’ve been embarrassed the last 20 years,” he said.
“There’s no worse feeling than knowing everyone thinks you’re a sex offender, than having a female counselor looking you in the eye, probably in her mind calling you a dirty dog, and you got to live with it.”
The determined Newton is intent on overcoming the indignity he’s had to live with for 22 years. He’s enrolled in school and will graduate with a B.S. in business administration from Medgar Evers College next June.
Law school, he says, is next.
He works as a youth mentor, goes on dates, surfs the Internet, and has just returned from a vacation in St. Croix, in the Caribbean, where he water-skied..
“Every day is like a celebration,” Newton said. “I walk around with a smile on my face.”
Most of all, he’s spending as much time as he can with his seven brothers and sisters, getting to know his long-lost 20 nieces and nephews.
Newton’s family – though overjoyed to have him back – said at first they didn’t know what to expect from an innocent man who had every right to hate the world.
“His coming out not bitter was a shock to everybody,” said his sister-in-law Vanessa Newton.
But “bitter” is not a word anyone would use to describe Alan.
“We don’t have to spend money for him to get counseling. Sometimes, we come to him for reassurance,” said Ray, an aerospace engineer from East Orange, N.J.
“He’s given me an influx of energy. One day in the spring, in a torrential downpour, he was walking and talking to me on his cellphone. I was like, ‘Shouldn’t you be running?’ He was just enjoying being out there in the rain.”
Newton also has a new legal battle to keep him going.
Last Tuesday, his lawyer, John Schutty, filed a $150 million lawsuit in Manhattan federal court against the city, the Bronx District Attorney’s Office and members of the NYPD.
For 11 years, Newton had filed application after application from prison, pleading with the Police Department to run DNA tests on a rape kit taken from the victim that fateful June day.
Prosecutors claimed the records had been destroyed and the kit was lost, Shutty said, until the crusading Innocence Project got involved.
Then, in 2005, the DA’s office found the kit exactly where it was supposed to be stored all along.
“You have a man in a cage. You have evidence to prove his innocence, and you fail to produce it on request,” said the lawyer.
“That’s a major problem. It was in the bin exactly where it was supposed to be. How did they not find it all those years? The only explanation is they chose not to look for it.”
The lawsuit isn’t simply about money, Newton insists. He wants to see the handling of evidence in criminal cases in New York – now done with paper slips and logbooks, not barcodes and computers, as in places such as Nassau County – brought into the 21st century.
“New York has no law on the preservation of evidence,” Newton said. “They could just throw evidence away while you’re on appeal. My goal is trying to get a law passed to hopefully make a difference.”
He said he doesn’t think about it every day, but prison will always be a part of his life. “It’s something that will always be near,” he said.
And he’s made sure to heed the lessons of the joint.
“If you don’t learn anything else in the penitentiary, you learn to mind your business,” he said.
“It makes you a better person, because you have to learn to live your life, to take care of yourself and your family. Some people worry about everything in the world but don’t have their own stuff together.”