It'll be a daily reminder of the nine years -- five of them spent in prison -- that Snipes spent trying to clear his name after being fingered as the masked robber of a Sanford-area convenience store.

"We got it! We got it, Mama!" Snipes told his wife, Chavala, when he saw the pardon. "Now my record can be cleared."

A jubilant Snipes arrived Friday morning with his wife and their 9-year-old son, Willis, at Easley's Office of Legal Counsel on West Jones Street to pick up the pardon of innocence, only the fourth given by Easley since he took office in 2001. The other three, involving two rape cases and a murder, all depended on DNA evidence for exoneration.

Snipes could have had the pardon mailed to him, but he chose to make the 40-mile trip to Raleigh after a 12-hour graveyard shift at the Sanford cotton mill where he works. He was looking forward to having the pardon handed to him at the office, but a press secretary for Easley gave the documents to Snipes' attorney, Paul Green, while Snipes talked to reporters outside about the time he spent wrongfully held in 17 prisons.

"I'm not the only one it happened to, and I'm probably not the last," Snipes said.

The application for a pardon, issued Tuesday, had been in Easley's hands since April 2004.

When asked what had taken so long, spokesman Seth Effron said only: "The process had been completed."

Easley, speaking to New York University law students Jan. 22, said he does not let his background as a prosecutor affect his decisions on clemency pleas.

"I can promise you that you look at these cases very differently as a governor than you do as a prosecutor," Easley said.

Snipes was actually released from prison in June 2003 after the Lee County district attorney decided to indict another man for the crime. The pardon, however, allows Snipes to seek compensation from the N.C. Industrial Commission -- $20,000 for each year spent in prison.

Since taking office in 2001, Easley has received 481 requests for pardons and granted four in his two terms (155 are pending), his office said. In former Gov. Jim Hunt's first two terms, 218 people were pardoned.

Getting a pardon is difficult, said Mary Ann Tally, who works with the Center for Death Penalty Litigation in Durham.

"I always tell people, 'That's a real long shot,' " Tally said. "You have to wonder about the number of innocent people in prison."

The Innocence Inquiry Commission, which Easley created last summer, began independent reviews of claims of wrongful convictions and is the first of its kind in the country.

Another man indicted

Snipes' son Willis, the youngest of his seven children, was 6 months old when Snipes was arrested after Thomas' Superette, a country store on N.C. 42 outside of Sanford, was robbed. Chavala Snipes would drive to wherever he was imprisoned, from the Tennessee to Virginia borders, for one-hour visits.

"I was dragging my son so he'd know who his daddy was," she said.

A new investigation by the State Bureau of Investigation, conducted at the request of Lee County District Attorney Tom Lock, found that a man named Terrance Wyatt had bragged about committing the crime, Green said. Wyatt was indicted but never convicted.

Snipes' original trial hinged on shaky evidence and testimony from store clerks who didn't see the robber's face but said he sounded like Snipes, an occasional customer, trying to disguise his voice. Friends and family members said Snipes was with them when the robbery occurred, but his attorney, Andre Barrett, later disbarred for stealing money from clients, never called them to testify.

After state and federal courts denied Snipes' appeals for a new trial, Green approached Lock, who had become a Superior Court judge, and asked him to take a fresh look at the case after Wyatt was arrested in connection with a similar robbery. Snipes was released from prison and his conviction overturned.

The push for the pardon of innocence was made so Snipes could seek compensation and be completely exonerated.

"Being not guilty is not the same thing as being innocent," Green said.

(Staff news researcher Brooke Cain contributed to this report.)

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