Exit To Freedom by Calvin Johnson. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2003. $24.95 — 286 pp.

With God as my witness, I have been falsely accused of these crimes. I did not commit them. I’m an innocent man.

— Calvin C. Johnston, Jr.

The above words were spoken by Calvin Johnston shortly before a Georgia judge gave him a life sentence in prison. Convicted of rape in 1983, Johnson spent 16 years in various Georgia prisons before he was finally freed after DNA testing proved him innocent of wrongdoing.

The charges against Johnston should never have required DNA testing to be disproved. The Georgia judicial system should never have brought Johnson to trial, much less found him guilty. As Johnson demonstrates in his account of his life Exit To Freedom, his first accuser described her assailant as clean-shaven, whereas Johnson had a beard at the time of the rape and at the time of his arrest. His second accuser was found to be mistaken while Johnson was in prison, though the state still refused to take that evidence into account regarding the charges in the first case.

Exit To Freedom, which Johnson wrote with the aid of Greg Hampikian, a Georgia college professor who teaches genetics and forensics, is a cool, calm recollection of a man grossly wronged by a system in which he believes. Johnson grew up in Ohio and Georgia among upper middle-class blacks; his father was an attorney, and his family’s neighbors in Georgia were famous politicians and sports figures. Though Johnson himself had bought and sold drugs, and was once arrested and convicted for breaking and entering, he was gainfully employed and living with his parents in Clayton County when detectives and police surrounded his home late one afternoon and arrested him for rape.

Throughout his shocking trial — the shenanigans of the court room with its inattentive jurors and confused witnesses should shock all but the most jaded readers — Johnson stoutly maintained his innocence. In prison itself, where he worked in operations ranging from clearing land in a swamp to the prison library, Johnson continued to insist on his innocence to the extent that he hurt his own parole by refusing to take a course for sex offenders.

At night, I cannot sleep. I again consider lying — not just attending the program but “participating.” I want to ease my mother’s pain, but I also realize that becoming an admitted rapist is irreversible. A false confession might get me home before Mom becomes too ill to talk, but I would then have no way of clearing the family name.

As we follow Johnson through his years in prison, through the long periods of boredom, the sudden acts of violence, the necessity of always preserving a defensive front to keep certain prisoners at bay, we also follow Johnson on a spiritual quest. In his first years in prison, he is by turns angry at the system and hopeful that he will soon be released from that system. As he enters more fully into prison life, he becomes embittered to the point of not caring about the prisoners around him or about the injustices that he sees. He focuses on getting parole and on having his conviction overturned, but as it becomes plain to him that neither event may occur, he begins to seek another “exit to freedom.”

This particular exit to freedom, which is Johnson’s spiritual conversion to Christianity, is one of the surprises of this fascinating book. Deep in his despair — Johnson despises faith because “it is the purest form of hope, and hope disgusts me more than anything else” — Johnson goes at the behest of an acquaintance to a Baptist meeting at the prison. He begins to read the Bible each day, falls in love with the scriptures, and even begins praying for those who sent him to prison. He prays for the district attorney, the jury, the prison guards, his ex-fiancee. “It is ironic,” Johnson says, “that the surest way into my prayers is to offend me.”

In the course of establishing a prison ministry, Johnson attracts the attention of the Innocence Project, a nonprofit legal clinic renowned for overturning convictions through DNA testing of evidence. Eventually, those who work at this clinic help Johnson win his freedom, and he returned home to help care for his ailing mother, to work, to marry and begin a family, and to remain active in ministering to others.

Exit To Freedom is a story that should appeal to readers interested in judicial reform, in our prisons, or in the conversion of hearts. Most of all, it should appeal to anyone who enjoys a strong and dramatic tale of struggle and triumph.

(Jeff Minick lives in Waynesville. He can be reached at saintsbookco@aol.com)