Freed from death row, ex-prisoner talks about what sustained him

Published: 2006-01-09

HAMPTON, Ga. (CNS) -- Juan Roberto Melendez Colon can remember holding a rope in his hands preparing to strangle himself in his prison cell on Florida's death row, but something held him back. Instead, he went to sleep and dreamed he was swimming again as he loved to do as a boy in the tranquil aqua waters of the Caribbean. "The sun was bright. The sky was blue. The palm trees looked so good from the shore of the beach, and I was right there in the Caribbean swimming. Then I saw ... four dolphins ... flipping and jumping like dolphins do. And then I looked to the shore and I saw my mama waving at me. ... I was happy," he recalled. He awoke with new hope that one day he would be found innocent, and he flushed the rope down the toilet. In January 2002, he became the 99th of 122 former death-row inmates to be exonerated in the United States since the death penalty was reinstated in 1976. He and 12 other exonerated men took part in a recent retreat in Hampton sponsored by the Witness to Innocence project.

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