PORTLAND, Maine — University of Maine law students Tuesday heard a first-hand account of what it's like to be on the wrong end of a false murder conviction.
Ricky Jackson served 39 years for a killing he did not do. He was released last November. That's the longest stretch behind bars served by anyone in the U.S. before being exonerated.
During all that time, Jackson told students he never lost hope that one day he would see justice.
Jackson was just a teenager in Cleveland, Ohio, when he was sentenced to death in 1975 for the murder of businessman Harold Franks.
At one point he came within a month of his execution date, before his sentence was commuted to life in prison in 1977.
Addressing a full lecture hall at the University of Maine's Law School in Portland, Jackson answered the question he says he's most often asked.
"Surviving prison," he says. "I'm often asked, 'How do you survive 39 years in prison?'"
The key, he says, is to keep busy, which includes having an active spiritual life.
"I think I joined every religion known to man," Jackson says. "I was telling the guys upstairs, I was a Catholic, Buddhist, Rastafarian, Muslim."
Jackson took whatever he could from these different faiths, he says, to help him through his years behind bars.
More than religion, though, Jackson says it was reading books that kept him sane.
He even helped set up a library in one of the prisons in which he served time.
"Books were my escape vehicle," he says. "I think that books gave me an avenue into the world that I couldn't get to physically."
Jackson says he particularly loved books about art. Ancient Egypt was a favorite topic — he learned to read hieroglyphics.
Not surprisingly, he also learned a lot about law.
"I was in the library a lot," he says. "They even gave me my own little corner with my own typewriter."
During his years of incarceration, Jackson says he never gave up hope that he would be released.
He also thought a lot about Edward Vernon, the 12-year-old boy who told police he saw Jackson and two other men commit the murder.
That false testimony secured Jackson's conviction and death sentence, and it was Vernon's decision to eventually recant his testimony that secured Jackson's release last year.
Jackson says he felt it was important to forgive Vernon when he was released from prison.
"I wanted to forgive him because I didn't want to be out in the world again and drag this burden out of the prison cell with me," he says. "I wanted to leave it there, that's where I wanted it to die."
He says Vernon was also a victim.
"He was a 12-year-old kid that was pretty much kidnapped by the police and turned into a professional witness for the state," he says.
After nearly four decades behind bars enduring the same daily routine, Jackson says there was a surreal quality to the days that followed his release 10 months ago.
"When you get out after being inside for so long, it's just like an overstimulation of the senses, color, smell, light, sound," he says.
"You're working for a cause, and when you're able to get somebody out like Ricky it gives meaning not just to your work but to your life," says Attorney Mark Godsey with the Ohio Innocence Project, which worked for nine years to get Jackson out of prison.
According to the Death Penalty Information Center,
Godsey says freeing the wrongly convicted from prison is an ongoing struggle.
"It's a civil rights movement, I mean we realize now that there's a lot of innocent people in our prisons," he says. "Getting the rest of society and the criminal justice system to recognize is a slow process. It's going to take decades but we're going to see a lot of reforms by the end."
As for Jackson himself, for the first time in many years he has plans for the future: he recently got engaged, bought a new home and says he's looking forward to doing something he has previously only dreamed about: hiking the Appalachian Trail.