The World is Different for a Released Prisoner

Adjusting to the changes in the world after nearly two decades in prison is hard enough, but think of the agony when you were committed for a crime you did not commit.

November 21, 2009
After 18 Years, Freed to a World With Cellphones
By JOHN ELIGON
Moments after he walked out of Sing Sing prison on Friday after serving 18 years for a crime that a judge ruled he did not commit, Fernando Bermudez Jr. was handed a cellphone so he could speak with one of his lawyers. It was the first time he had held one.
“It almost seemed like a little baby,” Mr. Bermudez said. “It was so delicate. I didn’t want to break it. I have to become more technologically advanced. I’m an anachronism, almost.”
Mr. Bermudez was accompanied by his wife, Crystal, and a husband-and-wife lawyer team, Michael and Lesley Risinger, who worked on his case. He spoke with reporters waiting for him outside the prison before getting in a car to go to the federal courthouse in White Plains to take care of paperwork.
“I’m feeling great on this glorious day of justice,” Mr. Bermudez, 40, said in a telephone interview from the car on his way to White Plains. “I greet you in the name of hope and redemption.”
He then talked about the emotions he felt as he stepped out of the prison. “What was going through my body was an exorbitant amount of palpitations,” he said, “joy and happiness to a level that I’ve never known before in my life.”
After signing documents in White Plains, Mr. Bermudez was driven to Danbury, Conn., where his wife lives, to reunite with his three children — ages 18, 8 and 3 — and her parents. There they went to a McDonald’s for a snack. Mr. Bermudez said earlier that they would head to his parents’ home in Manhattan on Friday night to eat — he was looking forward to ice cream and seafood, or “some Red Lobster type of fare.”
Mr. Bermudez was convicted in 1992 of killing Raymond Blount, 16, a year earlier after a dispute at a Greenwich Village nightclub. After his conviction, five witnesses who at trial had identified him as the killer recanted, saying in sworn affidavits that they had been coerced or manipulated by the police and prosecutors to identify Mr. Bermudez as the killer.
Those recantations were part of what led Justice John Cataldo of State Supreme Court in Manhattan to vacate Mr. Bermudez’s conviction last week.
Mr. Bermudez was not immediately released after Justice Cataldo announced his decision because he still had a 27-month federal sentence for a drug charge that he had pleaded guilty to after being arrested in the murder. A federal judge granted Mr. Bermudez bail on that charge, and his lawyers plan to argue for that sentence to be thrown out.
Mr. Bermudez said he hoped to earn the college degree he had been working toward in prison; he was five credits short of a bachelor’s in social and behavioral sciences from Mercy College. But for now, he said, he has some practical adjusting to do.

Copyright 2009 The New York Times Company