In 2023, They Found Freedom

Daryl Valentine isn’t ​“a beach kind of dude.” But the day the state allowed him to move out of a halfway home, he went to the West Haven beach because ​“the ocean is free.”

Maleek Jones used to love swimming, having grown up by the Brooklyn water. But his ankle monitor can’t go underwater, so he stayed out of his new backyard pool.

Adam Carmon has been out of prison for a year, but he still feels ​“a part of me that’s chained.” On anxious mornings, he got in his car and drove to the ocean so that his mind could clear.

Each of these men spent decades in prison after police and prosecutors coerced witnesses and suppressed evidence to frame them for murders they have always maintained they never committed. In 2023, they each took steps toward a life of freedom. 

In May, Valentine’s modified sentence ended, allowing him to move in with family while continuing to fight for the state to recognize the holes in his conviction. In June, the state dropped all charges against Carmon, officially liberating him from the justice system. In August, a federal judge overturned Jones’ conviction; in October, awaiting the state’s appeal, Jones took his first steps out of prison in 30 years.

They each found support in a growing community of wrongfully convicted New Haveners who are now free: Scott Lewis, Stefon Morant, Sean Adams, and others. Many had known each other from hours spent in the prison’s law library. Since getting out, they have leaned on one another to navigate an unfamiliar world; when Valentine rode the New York City subway for the first time en route to the Innocence Project, for instance, he called up Jones, a native New Yorker. 

Several among this group came together to support recently-pardoned Troy Streater’s successful campaign for election to the Board of Alders in January, nine months before he would be added to the National Registry of Exonerations in October. (“I’m proud of myself,” Streater said, adding that he hopes his story will ​“give other people hope.”) 

And many gathered at Gaylord Salters’ seven-day protest calling attention to New Haven’s history of police and prosecutorial misconduct that put dozens of innocent Black men behind bars. 

All the while, Jones, Carmon, and Valentine found themselves treading water. Over the course of 2023, they devised large and small methods of staying afloat in a world that can be both exhilarating and unforgiving to the formerly incarcerated.

"Why Is This Man So Happy?"

The first time Maleek Jones flew on an airplane, he almost didn’t make it through security. Not because he was carrying anything forbidden, but because he had no government-issued identification — only freshly-printed bond papers that bore his name. 

Early that September morning, Jones woke up in his cell at MacDougall-Walker Correctional Institution, unaware that it would be his last morning in prison after 31 years inside.

“I didn’t know that I was gonna be released that day,” he said.

He arrived at the Church Street federal courthouse at 10 a.m., still wearing his orange prison uniform, to appear before Judge Janet Hall. His lawyers and a dozen friends and family had been waiting for him. After over an hour of questioning and deliberating, Judge Hall, who had overturned Jones’ conviction a month prior, decided to let him go home that day.

It took hours for the probation office to process his release. Jones did not let himself believe that he would actually go home when his family brought him a pair of gray pants and a navy pinstriped button-down.

“I came in an orange jumpsuit,” he said. ​“I left wearing clothes my family had brought me.” 

Jones committed to staying with family in North Carolina. He had already secured a job at a mental health organization, where he could draw on past experience as a peer counselor while he was incarcerated. 

As part of his post-conviction federal supervision, Jones had to wear a G.P.S. ankle monitor confirming his location. Judge Hall said he had to be out of Connecticut by 9 p.m. that evening, en route to check in with a North Carolina probation office as soon as possible. 

So after a few last hours in Connecticut — enough time for a pizza party lunch and a seafood restaurant dinner — Jones drove into New York to check into a hotel by LaGuardia airport. ​“It was amazing, man, sleeping in the hotel that night on a real bed. I slept on a king-sized bed,” Jones said. ​“I just melted in that night.”

The next day, when T.S.A. officers at LaGuardia asked for Jones’ identification, he provided them with his bond papers. He had nothing else to give them. ​“They weren’t gonna let me on the plane,” Jones said. ​“We told them to Google my name.” Online, the officers found a trove of articles about Jones’ exoneration and his release from custody just the day before. They relented and let him through.

Jones is the kind of person who thrives in a bustle of people, surrounded by life stories he can only wonder about, by a frenetic energy he can endlessly absorb. ​“I’ve been in a box for thirty-something years,” he said. ​“I don’t want to be in at all. I just want to be out.” One of his favorite places in Charlotte is the Super Walmart, where he soaks in the feeling of ​“being out among people.” He laughed as he said, ​“People be like, You get too happy going to Walmart.”

Jones got that same feeling in LaGuardia airport, surrounded by travelers probably weary of heavy luggage and plane delays and poor customer service. ​“People were looking at me like, Why is this guy so happy?” he recalled. 

Waiting to board his first-ever plane, he thought about how ​“different people from all walks of life was in the airport, coming from different places.” He stepped onto the aircraft, ready to take flight.

"Scared To Death This Is Gonna Be The Thing They Use"

For months after a judge overturned his conviction, Adam Carmon could not trust his freedom. 

State Superior Court Judge Jon Alander issued the decision in November 2022. After 32 years of incarceration, Carmon was able to move out of prison and into a halfway home last December.

But he still faced the uncertainty — ​“the pain of unknowing” — of whether the state would pursue a new trial against him. He spent seven long months waiting. New Haven State’s Attorney John Doyle was silent.

During that time in limbo, Carmon had to wear an ankle monitor. He couldn’t understand why he was still being treated like a criminal. ​“It sends the message that, Oh, you’re free, but it’s a technicality. You’re going back,” he said.

Every component of Carmon’s routine entailed a learning curve.

“I had to go to a probation office by myself in a town that I didn’t know,” he said. ​“There’s no guide. There’s nobody to direct me where this place is.” At first, he had no drivers’ license, no familiarity with GPS. For a while, he got around exclusively by the state’s notoriously inscrutable bus system.

Once he got his license, driving brought its own anxieties. Once, on his way to a probation appointment, Carmon found himself in a traffic jam. He was alone in the car. The probation office called him and told him, ​“You’re two minutes late.” He called his lawyers, explained the traffic holdup. 

He remembers being ​“scared to death this is gonna be the thing they use to hurl me back in prison” — where Carmon, who was wrongfully convicted of murdering a baby, said he faced violence from other inmates and turned cheeks from prison guards.

Even after Doyle formally dropped all charges against him in June, after he could take off his ankle bracelet and move in with his partner, Carmon struggled with the feeling that his freedom could always be taken away. He had, after all, been unjustly imprisoned before. 

The worry followed him while he crossed the street, whenever the traffic light turned red before he made it to the sidewalk — did that count as jaywalking?

“Anything,” he said, ​“can hurl you back into a situation that you don’t want to be in.”

Someday, Carmon hopes to spend his days helping others navigate the transition out of prison, and the mental turmoil that transition often causes. For now, he finds meaning in helping hospital patients through his work as a dishwasher at Hartford Hospital. 

Carmon, who is suing the city for his wrongful imprisonment, seeks out respite from his own anxiety in the ocean, in dinners with his son Najee, in jokes and affectionate bickering with his fiancée Valerie. He reminds himself: ​“I know I’m here. I live every day as though I’m here.”

"I Will Never, Ever Forget"

One day, as Daryl Valentine remembers it, he was calling his girlfriend while stopping by the pharmacy to pick up a prescription. The pharmacist, a woman who seemed to be in her 30s, asked for his name, and he gave it to her. 

“How do you spell it?” she asked.

He spelled out the letters.

“Oh,” he recalls her saying. ​“You killed my uncle.”

Just from retelling the story, Valentine felt his heart racing again. He remembers telling the pharmacist, ​“I didn’t kill nobody.”

He watched her pick up the phone, he said. He didn’t know whom she was calling, but he worried about the fact that she had his address.

So Valentine spoke into his phone: ​“I gotta get out of here.”

He left the store, asked his doctor to send the prescription elsewhere, and notified his nephews in case someone showed up at the house where they all lived.

Valentine doesn’t blame the pharmacist, who was ​“going by what society and [her] friends was saying.”

Despite evidence that police had fabricated the charges against him — evidence that the state’s Conviction Integrity Review Unit initially found to indicate ​“official misconduct,” though the panel walked back that evaluation in a final draft of their report — Valentine has no pardon, no judge’s decision, no statewide report to corroborate his innocence. 

The last leg of Valentine’s commuted sentence, his ​“supervised release,” concluded in May. He moved out of a halfway home, where the occasional sounds of gunshots and sirens outside had often hurled him back to traumatic experiences of his past. He moved into his sister’s house in Hamden, where he’s able to spend time with loved ones — attending basketball games, for instance, and eating Thanksgiving dinner — long past his former 9 p.m. curfew. 

Though his sentence is technically over, his enduring conviction still requires him to dredge up difficult emotions explaining his story — to prospective employers, to skeptics in his own life, to pharmacists who recognize his name. ​“It’s hard for me to talk about my situation,” he said. 

Valentine is still fighting in a habeas lawsuit for his name to be cleared — but he does not want to entirely cut himself away from his past. He keeps in touch with about 10 people who are still incarcerated, dropping everything to take their calls, because he knows what it’s like to remain in prison and stop hearing from people who have moved on.

A resolute note crept into his usually quiet voice. ​“I will never,” he said, ​“ever forget the brothers that are inside.”