Backstory: 19 years wrongly behind bars - a 'gift'?

Tommy Doswell last saw freedom half a lifetime ago, but you'd never know it. At 46, he programs his new cellphone like a deft teenager. In a turned-back baseball cap, his shorts long and shirt wide, he moves about the hills above Pittsburgh like a kid, too - singing a song at his sister's house, taking in sights at a famous overlook, pointing out a familiar car, finally alighting in the postage-stamp yard of his mother's place in the projects. There, quaffing the delights of an Indian summer morning recently, Mr. Doswell leans back in a chair and turns his face toward the sun.

Hardly the torment - or edge - you'd expect of an innocent man locked up in prison for 19 years.

On March 13, 1986, Pittsburgh police came by Olivia Doswell's, to have a word with her son. There'd been a rape nearby, and, though Mr. Doswell bore no resemblance to the description given police, the victim and a witness picked him out of a photo array, triggering a cascade of injustice: an arrest, a conviction, and a 12- to 24-year sentence. But Doswell never strayed from his story of innocence. And on Aug. 1 he was freed - exonerated by DNA evidence.

Ironically, his honesty - the persistent claim of innocence - cost him more than guilt would have. He refused to confess to gain leniency or parole, and served at least six years more than he would have if he'd confessed. He also refused to harbor anger, adopting an attitude of such peace that he has become a model of forgiveness, his story broadcast worldwide.

When released from prison, the innocent often fall victim to the same depression, substance abuse, joblessness, and alienation that any ex-convict experiences, observes Colin Starger, staff attorney at the Innocence Project of the Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law, in New York, which helped secure Doswell's release. In the innocent, he says, all of that tends to be compounded by rage at having lost irretrievable parts of their lives.

Not so with Doswell who almost implausibly asserts that wrongful imprisonment was "God's gift" to him, and that by refusing bitterness toward those who wronged him, he's been given a chance to spread his faith. He came to see himself as a latter-day Joseph, sold into slavery and also wrongly accused of rape. All the publicity fulfills his beloved Proverb 18, which sustained him for years with the promise that his gift - the injustice done him - would bring him before "great men."

"What was meant for my evil, God meant for my good," he explains. It is this unquestioning trust in a divine purpose for his suffering that truly set Doswell free.

* * *

The man arrested at 25 had been no angel. What his mother recalls as "mischief" included blowing up cats with cherry bombs. The rape for which he served time wasn't his first run-in with the law. He'd been arrested on a number of minor charges and had already been acquitted of rape charges brought by an ex-girlfriend. The jury called the sex consensual, but the detective involved disagreed, and - as Doswell's defenders believe - wanted to "get" Doswell. The photo lineup that led to his conviction was put together in haste, by that same detective, say Doswell's lawyers and family.

"Police investigations usually zero in on someone on a hunch, whether or not the evidence is there," says James DePasquale, Doswell's Pittsburgh attorney. "Very often they're right. But too often they build their case by impropriety - saying 'take a good look at number 5' " in a lineup. In Doswell's case, his mug shot was marked with the suggestive "R" of the earlier rape charge.

But the young Doswell also showed promise. A well-known athlete in high school, he spent two years at college on a football scholarship, and briefly attended NFL training camp. A crooner, his bluesy serenades were popular at parties. He had a job with the city housing authority, and - a favorite of the ladies - he had a toddler son. Never a churchgoer, he was, however, raised to believe in God, and he says he turned to prayer from the day of his arrest - alone, on his knees, in his cell: "I said 'Lord, if you're who they say you are, reveal yourself.' I knew from the beginning that He heard me, and it would just be a matter of time."

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