Rodney Roberts was recently freed after spending seven years in prison and another ten in civil commitment for a 1996 rape he says he did not commit.
NEWARK — During the long years of confinement, cut off from his wife and the life he was just starting to build, Rodney Roberts gave up hope he’d ever live as a free man again.
“It was like being in the middle of a storm shouting and nobody hears you,” Roberts said.
Roberts spent 17 years locked up -- the first seven in state prison and the rest at a state treatment center for sexually violent predators. Through it all, he denied he was guilty of raping a 17-year-old Newark girl in 1996, even though doing so might have cleared the way for him to be freed much sooner.
“I knew I didn’t commit the crime I was charged with," Roberts said. "I knew I was innocent.”
Last month, Essex County prosecutors decided not to pursue an appeal of a judge's November decision to set aside Roberts' 1996 guilty plea to a kidnapping charge.
On March 14, Roberts was freed from a state facility for sex offenders in Avenel, where he'd been held for 10 years.
The decision was prompted by the surfacing of DNA evidence presumed to be lost forever that put a halt to a decade's worth of appeals, reversals and post-conviction legal battles.
Roberts was grateful for the decision by Assistant Prosecutor Clara Rodriguez.
“They could have 86’d it,” Roberts said, using a slang term for hiding evidence. “They could have continued with the same story but they didn’t.”
Roberts’ tortuous journey through the state’s criminal justice system began in July 1996 when he pleaded guilty to the kidnapping charge just two months after he was accused of sexually assaulting the woman by forcing her into a secluded area in Newark.
“They came at me saying they had all this evidence,” Roberts recalled. “I didn’t want to spend the rest of my life in jail for a crime I didn’t commit.”
Roberts claimed that on the day he pleaded guilty his attorney visited him in a holding cell and informed him that the victim had identified him, court testimony shows. Roberts denied knowing the woman.
At the time, Roberts had a criminal conviction for a robbery in his past, his attorney said.
Roberts said he mistakenly believed – based on what he said was his lawyer’s advice – that by pleading guilty to the kidnapping charge – and having the sexual assault dropped -- he would serve just a few years in jail. And, he believed wouldn’t face the consequences of indefinite civil commitment that’s used to hold defendants the state considers sexually violent predators.
In 2006, Roberts chose to fight to have the charges overturned on appeal by claiming his lawyer gave him bad advice.
Meanwhile, by refusing to admit his role in the rape, he had dashed any chance of being freed from indefinite civil commitment.
“He couldn’t progress in his treatment because he wouldn’t admit his guilt,” said Michael Pastacaldi, the Jersey City attorney who handled Roberts’ appeal. “He didn’t admit to what they wanted him to admit to.”
In 2007, the state’s Appellate Division reversed Roberts’ conviction and sent the case back to the trial court in Newark. State Superior Court Judge Eugene Codey held hearings on the case in 2009 and issued a decision in May 2010.
“It is obvious to even the most casual observer that this application by (defendant) is a blatant attempt to withdraw a voluntarily entered plea, whose sentence has already been served, solely to enhance his efforts to have his status as a Sexually Violent Predator reconsidered,” Codey wrote.
Codey determined that the victim’s 2009 hearing testimony, in which she claimed she could not recall identifying Roberts to police as her assailant, to be “rife with inconsistencies.”
And, he noted that DNA testing ruling out Roberts as the father of a child the woman gave birth to in February 1997 was “not dispositive” because she admitted having another sexual partner at the time.
The Appellate Division sent the case back to the trial court again in 2012.
This time, Newark police, at the urging of Essex County prosecutors, managed to find key pieces of evidence from a rape kit taken after the 1996 assault that hadn’t turned up before. Because Roberts pleaded guilty so soon after his arrest, no DNA tests of the evidence were done, prosecutors say.
Evidence in the form of semen from the kit was discovered by a Newark detective in 2013, Rodriguez said. And DNA tests conducted by state experts ruled out Roberts, she said.
It is still unclear whose semen was discovered, she said.
“It really did just come down to getting that DNA kit,” Pastacaldi said. “If we didn’t have that he could very well still be in there.”
In November, state Superior Court Judge Sherry Hutchins-Henderson dismissed Roberts’ kidnapping conviction.
“I felt like the weight of the world was lifted off my shoulders,” Roberts said. “It was so great to sit in a courtroom and be vindicated.”
And Roberts was released from the Special Treatment Unit for sex offenders at the Adult Diagnostic and Treatment Center in Avenel when Essex County prosecutors chose not to appeal.
The decision on Roberts’ March release was first reported by the New Jersey Law Journal.
Rodriguez said the decision not to go ahead was influenced, in part, by the victim’s reluctance to testify. “The evidence was not sufficient to go to trial,” Rodriguez said. “It was the right thing to do to dismiss it.”
For now, Roberts, who graduated from West Side High School in Newark, is working as a paralegal and helping other defendants who he believes were, like him, wrongfully convicted.
“I’m not bitter or anything,” he said. “I’m grateful and humbled.”
He is back living with his wife Lynda in Newark while he pursues a legal claim against the state seeking compensation for what he says was his unjust conviction.
And, Pastacaldi said, Roberts is trying to catch up to some of the technological changes that occurred outside prison walls while he was locked up.
“He’s got a smartphone and he’s been sending me texts,” Pastacaldi says.