It did in Erick Daniels' case. He said he spent seven years -- a third of his life -- reading, sleeping and reflecting while incarcerated for a crime he didn't commit.

"I feel like I'm a decent person," he told me while seated in the den of his grandmother's home in Durham. "As far as my character, I'm not outstanding. I could be better, but I'm not no robber or burglar."

Yet, he was convicted of being both when he was 14 and tried as an adult. He was freed last week after Judge Orlando Hudson threw the case out.

Daniels said that while in prison, he read about the Duke lacrosse case, in which prosecutorial and police misconduct -- including a flawed, unfair photo lineup like the one that got him sent away -- resulted in three innocent men being charged with rape.

Daniels unflinchingly admits that during the first 14 years of his life "I wasn't no angel."

"Smoking reefer, ducking school," he said, were his main pre-prison offenses, "but I've learned that education is important. I got a GED" while locked up.

What about the next seven years?, I asked.

"I want to be established financially and mentally, family-based. I want to be correct," he said. "I don't want to wake up worried about somebody putting handcuffs on me."

He acknowledged, though, that that is precisely what some people expect will happen. "I see it from people I know. It's a vibe I get. ... That's just the way it is. I ain't trippin' over it, though.

"It's understandable that somebody'd think I'd go back. There's that shadow of doubt" among some people, he said, that he might not be the innocent victim the judge ruled he is.

Daniels went into prison as a thin, 5-foot-4 little boy who screamed "Mommy" when the judge announced his sentence.

He filled out a bit and grew 2 inches while locked up. He speaks with a surprising acceptance -- if not for prison, then for what it represented. "It's been a journey. There wasn't a 'good' day, but some were better than others. I feel every bit of every one of them, but at the end of the day, I love the fact that I came through it."

That he had to come through it at all, that he did seven years on flimsy or nonexistent evidence, isn't necessarily a sign that the cops or the prosecutor had it in for him.

It's worse than that: It's a sign that Erick Daniels barely registered enough for them to do their jobs properly.

Robert Harris, Daniels' attorney, acknowledged -- to his credit, if he deserves any credit -- that his defense of Daniels was lacking. He said he told prosecutor Freda Black that he knew who the real robber was and that the robber was going to 'fess up.

Black, from the stand in court last week and in a telephone interview Wednesday, admitted that she did not pursue the case. "Some time after the trial, the attorney for Mr. Daniels came to me and said a man in federal prison was going to confess to the crime. ... I told him to show me an affidavit or a notarized confession and I'd be glad to go to the DA to reopen the case.

"I never heard from him again. ... I later heard that the man refused to sign because he said he was not in fact the person who committed the crime," she said.

Daniels, like most of the cats I've talked to who did stretches for crimes they didn't commit, was free of anger.

We shouldn't be.

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