It�s easy enough to look at him now and see an open-faced, harmless man. His attitude is amazingly cheery, given that he spent 16 years in prison for a rape it now seems he did not commit. But when police arrested Calvin Johnson, Jr., in 1983, they had good reason to believe he was a serial rapist. Jurors took only 45 minutes to convict him following a three-day trial, during which two women identified him as the man who raped them, another pointed to him as the stranger she�d found standing in her apartment one night, and a fourth said that his had been the frightening face at her window.
DNA evidence now says the sperm inside the woman whose rape sent Johnson to prison was not his, and that it came from a different black man whose pubic hair was found in her bed. Although it�s possible to think of a scenario in which the DNA evidence and the verdict could both be correct, it�s unlikely. Instead, it seems safe to agree with what the prosecution and the defense now say: Calvin Johnson, Jr., was not guilty.
