Innocent. But Never Free.

After much deliberation, the courtly older man finally decides which indoor TV antenna to buy. Behind the counter, the young sales associate, who had patiently offered his advice, tallies the total. As the customer's wife writes out a check, a look of mock amazement crosses the associate's face. "You mean you buy it and she pays for it?" he asks. "Let me shake your hand." The couple leave the store, what-a-nice-young-man smiles on their faces as they head for their car parked in this strip mall in the Mississippi Delta town of Greenwood.

How would they react if they knew that the poised and charming salesman, Donnell Johnson, spent five years behind bars, convicted of murdering a 9-year-old boy on Halloween in 1994 in a faraway Boston housing project? Perhaps their shock would ease when Johnson, now 27, explains that he was released from prison in 1999 and exonerated of that heinous crime; that prosecutors now agree with what he had said all along, that he didn't do it. "I only tell close friends about what happened," says Johnson. But other people read about him in the press. "They're all surprised I did five years. All they know is me and the person I am now, not the naive, silly Donnell hanging out with the boys."

Last month, Johnson received an undergraduate degree with honors in criminal justice from Mississippi Valley State University in nearby Itta Bena. While in college, he began working full time for Radio Shack, winning awards and promotions. That Johnson initially did not want his employer named reflects his lingering fear about reaction to his history, exonerated or not.

More than a decade after that fateful Halloween, Donnell Johnson is doing well deep in Dixie. "He took the initiative to go to college despite the fact that he went into prison at the age of 16 and came out when he was already beyond the normal college age," says Stephen Hrones, Johnson's attorney. "Donnell didn't just bemoan his fate and claim others destroyed his life. He looked forward."

At about the same time that Johnson was charming customers in Mississippi, Peter Vaughn was finishing his three-hour shift preparing food for a mental health facility in Brockton. For the 43-year-old Vaughn, holding down any job -- even a low-wage, part-time one -- is a big step. Like Johnson, Vaughn was also released from a Massachusetts prison after a court reversed his conviction. But unlike Johnson, who returned to his family and church, Vaughn had no safety net waiting when the guard at MCI-Norfolk told him in 1986 that he was to be set free the next day. "I was scared," recalls Vaughn. "I didn't even know how I was going to get home."

Vaughn had completed 41 months of a seven-to-12-year sentence imposed after witnesses identified him as the "outside man," or lookout, in the 1983 armed robbery of a Star Market in the Fenway. A jury convicted him even though the market had been robbed again two months later, and a security camera photographed an outside man with similar clothing and physical characteristics. Vaughn had the ultimate alibi for that second robbery: He was locked up at the Charles Street Jail on an unrelated charge. When the Appeals Court of Massachusetts reviewed his case in 1986, it found that "the documentary evidence ... was so compelling that reasonable jurors could not have been satisfied of [Vaughn's] guilt beyond a reasonable doubt." The court ordered Vaughn's acquittal and release.

No court, however, could order his happiness. The time Vaughn served for the crime he did not commit compounded longtime problems: a troubled family history, drugs, and his own poor choices. While serving that sentence -- not his first but his longest -- Vaughn rarely saw his mother or son. His best friend died. "The underlying issue was my being in prison for something I didn't do - why did it happen to me?" he says. "Why did it happen to me?"

For Johnson, exoneration led to a college degree, steady work, and more. For Vaughn, it led to heartbreak, homelessness, and a long, painful search for normalcy.

They have become an informal fraternity, this band of exonerated brothers cleared of crimes as serious as murder and rape. According to the New England Innocence Project, 23 people in Massachusetts prisons have had their convictions overturned since 1982, including 17 in Suffolk County. The Commonwealth is at least helping them. Under a law signed late last year, people who have been wrongfully convicted of crimes can sue for access to a range of services, up to $500,000 in compensation for their lost liberty, and their records are expunged of wrongful charges. About 15 other states also provide compensation, but the Massachusetts statute goes further by offering educational and human services. Joseph Savage, chairman of the New England Innocence Project, calls the law "a huge move in the right direction."

Vaughn plans to seek compensation under that law. So might Johnson, who sued two Boston police detectives involved in his case and is appealing a federal judge's decision last year to dismiss the suit.

Donnell Johnson says he was a star teenage athlete, especially in football and baseball. But his cheerful boasting fades into soft bitterness as he looks back at where things went wrong. "Something I really fight with is that if I'd never been arrested, could I be in the pros now?" he says. "I didn't get the opportunity to find out if I was good enough. I never had the opportunity to blow my knee out. Some people say 'could have' and 'should have.' For me, they were not options."

Neither, he says, was staying in Boston after his conviction was reversed. "When I got out, I was able to see where the street life had got me. With my church and family, they were always behind me. But the street - the people I thought were my friends - left me out to dry."

The streets around the Bromley-Heath housing project where he was raised were a powerful temptation, despite the best efforts of his family and church. As a 13-year-old, Johnson was charged with assault and battery with a knife. At 16, he was arrested in connection with a gang-related shooting. While charges were dismissed in both cases, Johnson was squarely on the police radar. So after witnesses identified the Halloween shooter of Jermaine Goffigan as a tall, light-skinned African-American man with freckles and an Afro, Johnson was arrested within 24 hours and charged with murder.

Johnson insisted he was innocent. Family members supported his alibi that he was home watching Monday Night Football. But witnesses identified him, and he was convicted in 1996, first by a juvenile-court judge and again in a jury trial. He was sentenced to 18 to 20 years in juvenile and then adult facilities, where he served until 1999, when members of a Boston gang, seeking to cut a deal in the face of federal drug charges, told investigators that Donnell Johnson was, in fact, innocent. (Two other men, one of whom was said to resemble Johnson, later confessed to the shooting.)

Stuck in prison, Johnson stewed while those he thought were his friends, who knew who really had pulled the trigger, stayed silent. He grew determined to leave the streets that had tempted but betrayed him, so after his release, he moved in with his grandfather in Brockton and worked as a cook. In prison, he had earned enough credits to graduate from East Boston High School. His next goal was college.

"I always wanted to go to a historically black college with relatively small classes that was in someplace opposite from city life," he says, sitting in a restaurant in the small historic downtown center of Cleveland, Mississippi. "My first choice was in Virginia. I told the interviewer there my whole story, but I think that's what made them shy away from me." A fellow member of Dorchester Temple Baptist Church, which set up a scholarship fund for Johnson, recommended Mississippi Valley State.

"Getting out of state worked for me," Johnson says. "If someone is failing, chances are he's still around negative things. People get stuck in their environment, that mentality, that life. Growing up in the projects, you think the only way you can go to college is through sports, not by being smart or by reading."

In Mississippi, Johnson dated a classmate, and they had a daughter, Alyvia, who is now 3. Johnson and Alyvia's mother are no longer together but remain friends. "I was a freshman and she was a junior," he says. "I was still discovering myself when I met her. I was 21, but after spending my teenage years in prison, I didn't really know about real simple stuff that most people take for granted, like how to even talk to a woman."

He had missed his high school prom, but Johnson learned lessons even his criminal justice professors hadn't. "A lot of their theories were off," he says. "Only a few of my professors knew my history, and one asked me to speak in her class. It was strange, because a lot of the class members were graduate students who work in the criminal justice system. Some have a the-system-never-fails mentality, so what I said was an awakening."

Johnson's new friends call him "Boston." He calls Curressia Brown, a professor of business administration, his "Mississippi mentor." "We could look at the book and speculate, but he had a unique knowledge he could share," says Brown. "I urged him to use his past not as an excuse but as a lesson. I told him he has the right to be angry and resentful, but you don't have the right to just lie there. You have an obligation to get up. That's what the second chance is for."

Robin Johnson, Donnell's mother who now lives in Maryland, says support is the key to success in that second chance. "When these people get out, they're often hitting society with no one there to hug them or to greet them or even to listen to them. There may be big hoopla at the beginning, but when the smoke clears, what happens then?"

What's happened to Donnell Johnson is that he has become the first member of his family to graduate from college. And he wanted a photograph of that May 14 graduation moment to appear alongside this story. "The last time my picture was in the newspapers in Boston, it was in connection with a murder," he says. "I want everyone to see me now in a cap and gown."

Peter Vaughn looks out proudly from the photograph on the wall of his apartment in the converted Ellis Brett School in Brockton. He stands with a group of men, all exonorees, and state Representative Patricia Jehlen, a Somerville Democrat who cosponsored the new state law that assists the wrongfully convicted. How different he looks - how much healthier and happier - than in the snapshot he digs up from around 1986, when he was an agitated and angry inmate at MCI-Norfolk, a medium-security state prison. So agitated, in fact, that his brother Sal Ali - who was serving time for bank robbery in a nearby cell - urged Vaughn to go to the prison infirmary, which committed him to Bridgewater State Hospital for 30 days. Shortly after returning to Norfolk, Vaughn learned he would be released.

When his mother arrived in a cab from Brockton to pick him up, Vaughn took it straight to Boston's South End. There, he moved in with the mother of his son, Pierre Vaughn, 7, and tried to work a construction job. But in that familiar life, he fell back on familiar vices. "We were crammed into this studio apartment," Vaughn recalls. "I was blindsided by the coke and the drinking. You don't know when you cross the invisible line and become addicted, but I went way over it. I lived in total numbness from drugs."

That little boy would end up on drugs and in trouble himself. And he and his father would become estranged after Peter called the police on his son. "I didn't want what happened to me to happen to him," he says. But then, on June 12, 2001, while Vaughn was in protective custody in a Fall River psychiatric hospital, he got the news about his son. Hours before a trial on drug trafficking charges, Pierre Vaughn, 22, was found dead in his cell in the Ash Street Jail in New Bedford, a thermal T-shirt wrapped around his neck and tied to his cell bars.

Vaughn discusses this painful past with the same calm with which he blows cigarette smoke out his apartment window. His mother, Hazel Barros, brings food for her son and his guests but says little. Just a few years ago, Vaughn was locked up for threatening her. Today, he realizes that she has been his quiet anchor. Looking at the food, Vaughn says, "How much do I owe you, Mom?"

"Your life."

In 1969, Barros moved her six sons from California to Falmouth, where she had family. Vaughn says he was placed in an orphanage at age 8 while his mother looked for an apartment. "I had older brothers who weren't good examples, and I pursued what they did," Vaughn says. By the time he was 14, he was into drugs and car theft. Arrested several times as a juvenile, Vaughn entered a Department of Youth Services halfway house in Springfield, in a neighborhood he says was full of drugs. After 18 months, he moved to Roxbury to live with his mother and brothers. At 17, he became a father and dropped out of high school. "After the baby was born, we needed money."

As a young man, Vaughn worked unskilled jobs and boosted cars to pay for drugs. "It was easier to make money stealing than by going to work," he says. "I'm not proud of it." While serving six months in 1983 for breaking and entering, he was charged with the Fenway robbery. At trial his clearly agitated state did little to help his case, and fighting and other problems landed him in solitary confinement for 23 hours a day.

In 1986, that conviction was reversed. "Peter was deprived of more than three years of his life through no fault of his own," says Amanda Metts, a Boston lawyer with McDermott Will & Emery who represents Vaughn. "He has borne not only the psychological impact of that wrongful conviction but the reality of being suddenly released from prison without counseling, a job, or even so much as an apology."

Two months after his release, Vaughn moved to Brockton to live with his mother. He met Isabel Goncalves, and they had a daughter, Bianca, who is now 14. They lived together for five years as Vaughn intermittently sought drug treatment. But it didn't stick. He'd fall back into drugs and petty crime. After a 1994 stay in a detox program, Vaughn came home to find that Goncalves who, he says, didn't even tolerate smoking -- had finally had it. "I walked in, and my bags were packed," he says.

He moved to a cheap hotel and found work with a temp agency. "I was clean for three months but relapsed." Police arrested him after seeing him steal a car's radar detector, but that bust also led to a breakthrough, Vaughn says. "That was the last day I took drugs." It was November 1, 1994 -- the same day Donnell Johnson was arrested in the murder of Jermaine Goffigan. While Vaughn was serving several months for the theft, another family tragedy hit: A brother died of AIDS. "I took it pretty hard," Vaughn says. "I went to the funeral in handcuffs. I had to try to get over it while in a jail cell." Another brother later died. (Vaughn doesn't know the cause.) And his brother Sal Ali? He is serving a life sentence for another bank robbery.

For much of the late 1990s, Vaughn was in and out of homeless shelters and halfway houses. He'd often seek -- or be forced into -- treatment for what he has been told is schizoaffective disorder. But he'd fall off his medications and the bad behavior would return, finally striking at his strongest support, his mother. Believing she had stolen money from him, Vaughn threatened her. He was arrested and served a 120-day sentence, after which he was back on the streets. "Living in the street in the snow and cold, being turned away from shelters because they were full -- that was the end for me." Police placed him in protective custody twice, including that time in a Fall River hospital when he learned of Pierre's death. After that, he began to stay on his meds and saw his counselor more consistently. He started to attend Alcoholics Anonymous and Narcotics Anonymous meetings more regularly. In 2003, he found a subsidized apartment in the old school.

Dale Revzon worked closely with Vaughn as his case manager at the Department of Mental Health's Multi-Service Center in Brockton until her retirement in April. She says she knew from the time she met him in 1993 that "he absolutely needed treatment. Mental illness was his problem," but it took the double shock of a homeless winter and the death of his son for Vaughn to be ready to help himself. Since 2002, she says, Vaughn has stayed on his meds, kept clean, maintained his apartment, and been consistently on time for his job at the Multi-Service Center, or MSC, where he prepares food and helps run the cafeteria.

"He works very hard and is well liked and funny," says Revzon. "The best breakfast going now is at the Brockton MSC. I see it turning around for Peter on a daily basis. This man has worked extremely hard and is doing what he has to do in the recovery process. He'll always have to be in that process, for both drugs and mental illness."

Vaughn has even become a role model for younger members of his family, says Revzon. "His family has had such incredible tragedy, so many things have happened. But they can use Peter to help some of the kids coming up, trying to help them learn the easier way, rather than the hard way he experienced." Vaughn also tells his story to teenagers under DYS supervision, as he was once himself. And he tells it to his daughter.

What if that false Fenway conviction had never happened? Vaughn is asked. After all, he'd messed up before that, and he messed up after. He pauses before answering. "Without that felony on my record, if I hadn't gone through what I went through serving that time, I might have had a fulltime job. I might have still had a family. I might not have used so many drugs. I might not have committed any more crimes. I might have set myself straight, which I was trying to do before that arrest."

But then, Vaughn says, "I don't blame anybody for what I did wrong. I blame myself for doing drugs, but I don't feel sorry for myself. I ask God for guidance every day. I go to meetings three times a week. And I stay sober. I've come too far to let myself down."

Phil Primack is a freelance writer in Medford. His last article for the magazine was about Jack Welch. E-mail him at pnprimack@yahoo.com.