Wrongly convicted man free after 8 years

Every day behind bars was torture, but holidays hurt the most. It wasn’t just missing Thanksgiving or Christmas with his family. It was that he’d miss out next year, too, and the year after that, and the year after that. Every year for the rest of his life. Prison isn’t supposed to be easy, of course. If you can’t do the time, don’t do the crime — but what if you didn’t do the crime? Welcome to Uriah Courtney’s nightmare. He was convicted of sexually assaulting a high school girl in Lemon Grove — a brazen attack in the middle of the day on a well-traveled street — and sentenced to spend forever behind a chain-link fence topped by razor wire. He was 26. He knew he looked guilty. That was part of his anguish, how he’d put himself in this predicament. He had a criminal record. He was a drug addict and an alcoholic. He disappeared just as police started looking for him. But a rapist? “I would never do such a thing,” he said. “That’s just not the kind of person I was, even at my lowest moments.” Full Article