Profile of Exoneree Lewis Fogle Reveals Struggle of Post-Release Life

As the first part of a four-part series, the

Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

released a story yesterday about Innocence Project client and recent exoneree Lewis Fogle and the struggles he’s having adjusting to life after spending 34 years in prison for a crime he didn’t commit. 

In 1976, 15-year-old Kathy Long was found in the backwoods of Indiana County, Pennsylvania. She had been raped and shot in the head. Lewis Fogle was convicted based on the fabricated testimony of three jailhouse informants who said that Fogle had confessed to them. He was sentenced to life in prison and spent 34 years wrongfully incarcerated before DNA testing secured by the Innocence Project revealed that he was excluded as the perpetrator. This past Augue, Fogle’s fight for innocence and freedom came to an end.

But, as the

Post-Gazette

story reveals, Fogle’s struggle continues. At the age of 64, Fogle was released from prison and reunited with his family. But, everything—especially Fogle—has changed over the course of three and a half decades.

Shaped by years of being imprisoned for someone else’s crime, Fogle is now faced with the challenge of making sense of day-to-day life as a free man while still reeling from the decades-long injustice he’s endured. From reestablishing relationships with his family to figuring out how he’ll make financial ends meet—especially given that Pennsylvania does not compensate wrongfully convicted people for their time in prison—Fogle is now confronted with developing a new set of survival skills, this time for the outside world.

Read the entire profile

here

. 

Learn more about Fogle’s case

here

.