CLEVELAND, Ohio – Three men wrongly convicted of murder are for the first time speaking together locally about their ordeal and their triumph over incredible odds.
Ricky Jackson, Wiley Bridgeman, and Kwame Ajamu were sentenced to death in a 1975 robbery-murder in Cleveland. The crime left a man dead outside of a store.
The death sentences were later commuted to life in prison.
The three were exonerated of their crimes Dec. 9.
"I never lost sight of the fact that these were two gentlemen that I knew would go to the wall with me," Jackson told WKYC Channel 3's Hilary Golston. "That gave me strength. Not only did I realize that my brothers were suffering and struggling to hang on ... and I had to do the same thing. We had to get where we are together."
Jackson and Bridgeman were released Nov. 21,more than 39 years after they had been locked up.
"That was the most wonderful time in my life. You can't imagine being incarcerated 39 years anyway. It was like walking on air," Bridgeman said of the release.
"I'm extremely happy. I'm honestly on top of the world. I don't have a care in the world," Jackson added. "People will find this hard to believe, but after 39 years ... I feel right now today that I was never in prison. I don't know where I got that from."
Ajamu, Bridgeman's brother, was released from prison in 2003 and waited from the outside as he watched his friend and brother remain behind bars for a crime he knew they didn't commit
.
"I actually didn't want to be released. I felt like we should all be released together. I felt like we all went in together, we were innocent and that we all should be released together, but the system plays different games," Ajamu told Golston. "I never revealed to them, but for a long time I had felt that I had left them behind. I had this feeling that always that they had let me out and I had left them behind."
While Ajamu's experience was the shortest, he described his imprisonment as a harrowing time.
"I was 17 years-old and had been incarcerated ... on death row for no reason," Ajamu said. "Yeah, that tore me up, the fact that I couldn't get to these two guys. Yeah, that killed me. We were traumatized. There's no other way to say that. We were traumatized, but we survived."
Follow Hilary Golston on Twitter: @HilaryWKYC
