
While serving 20 years in prison for a wrongful conviction, Angel Gonzalez painted: a lighthouse, a stream, a mountain, a blue truck, a snow-covered cabin in the woods.
âEvery time I painted something I felt like I was escaping away from the world, from prison,â Gonzalez told Fusion, hours after exiting Dixon Correctional Center in Illinois. âFeeling freedom. To share with the world, a little bit, I guess, how you feel when youâre inside there. Youâre so far away from reality that you sometimes you feel like youâre on a whole different planet.â
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Gonzalez, a Mexican national from Waukegan, spoke on the phone Tuesday night after his release. âWe got out and I eat chicken sandwich,â he said, laughing. Before his first home-cooked meal in decades, Gonzalez and Vanessa Potkin, his lawyer from The Innocence Project, made a clandestine pitstop at the restaurant Potbelly for a snack. âBusted,â said Potkin.
This week, DNA evidence proved Gonzalezâs innocence in the rape and kidnapping of a woman in 1994. Test results showed bodily fluids of two unknown menâand not that of Gonzalezâon the victim and her clothing. The Innocence Project, which took up the case in 2012 after years of letters from Gonzalez, said that a coerced confession, along with a questionable traffic stop and a deeply-flawed identification process known as the âshow-up,â led to Gonzalezâs 55-year sentence.
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Gonzalez, however, had not served a three-year criminal damage to state property sentence he received in 1996 for destroying a sink while in solitary confinement.
âAfter 20-something years they were taking me back for a sink and a toilet?â he said. âI was like, âWow, why donât you just give three years away? Thatâs all you have to do. Why are you sending me back?â I couldnât understand. I was frustrated.â
Finally, 27 hours after his exoneration, the lesser charges were dropped by a Livingston County judge. Gonzalez, with a goatee and shaved head, walked outside for a press conference and photo-op.
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This reversal is the fifth case in five years to be cleared because of DNA evidence in Lake County, which has been marred by a resistance to forensic evidence and a spate of wrongful convictions. It also arrives at a time of distrust in the police after the deaths of Tamir Rice, Michael Brown, and Eric Garner.
âOh man, it was kind of horrible,â Gonzalez said of his exoneration. âThe judge was not very nice for whatever reason so I was like, âWow, I canât believe it.â She made me feel like I was on trial all over again. She dropped the charges but at the same time she was so mean. It was kind of scary, Iâm not going to lie, to look at her face, how mad she was.â
Potkin said the courtroom on Monday afternoon was packed with Gonzalezâs family and friends, yet the judge never acknowledged the huge injustice at hand. âHe was treated like a criminal,â she said. He had shackles on, his family couldnât touch him, and he wasnât allowed to turn around and speak to them. âHe was treated with no humanity.â
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The celebration after the charges were tossed was muted. Gonzalez was ordered back to prison. His visa had expired, though the immigration holdâand threat of deportationâwas lifted Tuesday.

Stateâs Attorney Mike Nerheim, who did not preside over the case in 1994, was deeply apologetic for Gonzalezâs ordeal. He said the victim was âdevastatedâ by the reversal.
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The evidence against Gonzalez was always questionable, said Potkin.
On July 10, 1994 the 35-year-old victim answered her door, was kidnapped by two men, and raped in nearby bushes, according to court documents. Gonzalez was at his girlfriendâs sisterâs apartment at the same complex when the crime occurred. Four witnesses confirmed his alibi at trial.
The victim said her attackers had a âlate model, dark colored, four-door sedan with tinted windows.â Using this vague description, police stopped Gonzalez later that night. The victim was brought to the traffic stop whereâfrom the backseat of a carâshe identified Gonzalez, illuminated only by the headlights of the squad car, handcuffed and standing next to a police officer. She would later say in court that âhe was wearing the same clothes.â
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âOnce that identification was made, thereâs testimony in the records, the officers believed he was guilty and nothing was going to change their mind,â Potkin said. âSo they went in to questioning him with their mind set.â
After 13 hours in police custody and four hours of interrogation, Gonzalez, who only spoke broken English, confessed that he assaulted a woman but that he did not ejaculate. He wrote a short statement about the crime in Spanish. When the statement didnât match the details of the crime, officers wrote a statement for him in English, which he signed after translation, according to The Innocence Project. Police used this confession to dismiss DNA evidence that didnât match Gonzalez. Another DNA test was dismissed again less than ten years later. After all, he said he didnât ejaculate.

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The National Registry of Exonerations reports that there have been 1,564 exonerations since 1989. More than 300 of these people, including Gonzalez, were exonerated using DNA evidence. Gonzalez, who had 20 years taken away from him, will now live with his parents and three siblings, all legal residents, in the Chicago suburbs. On his first night back with his family, he gave his nephew Carlos a painting.
âThey would remind me of freedom,â he said. âRemind me that one day I was going to be free. I donât know how but I know one day Iâm going to be free. Iâm not the monster they say who I am.â
