17 Years on Death Row For Another Man's Crime

For Juan Melendez, May, 2 1984 began like most other days. He and his friends were eating lunch under a tree at the apple orchard where he worked. Then the police showed up, followed by some FBI agents.

They said his name. They wanted to see if he was missing a tooth. (He was.) They wanted to see if he had a tattoo. (He did.) 

They charged him with armed robbery and the murder of Florida cosmetology school owner named Delbert Baker the previous year.  Melendez didn't know what "extradited" meant until an interpreter told him. But he waived extradition. He knew he was innocent, and assumed it would be easy enough to prove.

"I was naive to the law, naive to the language," Melendez said. And thus he spent the next 18 years in prison, most of that time on Florida's death row.

Melendez told his story Tuesday to a group of about 100 students at. His appearance was sponsored by "Stamnesty," the school's social justice group.

Melendez was the 99th death row inmate to be exonerated since the country reinstate the death penalty 27 years ago.

In Melendez's case, he was set free after a new team of lawyers found a tape of another man confessing to the murder in a box of evidence kept by the public defender who had represented Melendez at trial. They were also able to track down witnesses who said this man -- whose name was Vernon James, and who died in between the time of the Baker murder and when Melendez was freed -- confessed to them as well.

Since he left prison in 2002, another 139 people have also been exonerated. He now travels the country, giving talks as an anti-capital punishment advocate.

"We can never…and I repeat, we can never release an innocent man from the grave," Melendez said.

In prison, he saw many men -- men whom he came to consider his brothers -- taken away to the electric chair.

"I can still hear the sound. NNNN. NNNN. NNNN. I know precisely the time when it happens," Melendez said. "And believe me, some of them are innocent."

It was his fellow inmates, he told the students, who taught him to read, write and speak English, and to let go of his anger. He said he took a path a lot of men on death row take: finding religion.

"Some of them become Muslims. They pray to Allah, and teach others how to write and how to read," Melendez said. Others became Buddhists. Raised in heavily Catholic Puerto Rico, he chose Christianity.

" I believe we're serving the same god with different names, and all we have to do is make good choices in life."

 I believe we're serving the same god with different names, and all we have to do is make good choices in life."

Melendez was released from prison in early 2002. A throng of reporters waited for him outside: CNN, ABC, the BBC, "all the letters of the alphabet." One of them asked what he would do next.

 "'I want to see the moon. I want to see the stars,'" he recalled telling them. "'I want to walk on the grass, on the dirt. I want to hold a little baby in my arms.'"

He had left prison to a wave of applause and cheers from the inmates, with the guards calling him "Mr. Melendez." He had gotten to say goodbye to one of his cellmates. They had both cried. Melendez said he couldn't even talk.

"He's in a state of shock but hes smiling," Melendez said. "And that's how I was and I'm still smiling today."

The other inmate, whose names was Clarence Hill, and who had been convicted of killing a police officer, told Melendez to stay out of trouble, and to be good to his mother. Hill was executed by lethal injection in 2006.