James Bain used a cell phone for the first time Thursday, calling his elderly mother to tell her he had been freed after 35 years behind bars for a crime he did not commit.
Mobile devices didn't exist in 1974, the year he was sentenced to life in prison for kidnapping a 9-year-old boy and raping him in a nearby field.
Neither did the sophisticated DNA testing that officials more recently used to determine he could not have been the rapist.
I'm very much a tough-on-crime type, as well as a supporter of capital punishment. So, in the interests of justice, I warmly support projects that result in freeing wrongly convicted people. The Innocence Project is perhaps the best known one.
