Letting Go of the Past, Embracing the Future

BALTIMORE —  The gravelly voice on the phone was one he hadn’t heard in years and didn’t expect to hear again. But he recognized it instantly.

It was the voice that had filled a courtroom so long ago and successfully prosecuted him for murder.

A murder he didn’t commit, but spent 27 years in prison for.

“I can still remember him pointing his finger in my face yelling to the jury that I was the killer,” Michael Austin says.

The voice was that of former Baltimore prosecutor Joseph Wase, who called Austin days after his Dec. 28 release from prison. Finally, the overwhelming evidence of Austin’s innocence had forced a judge to overturn the wrongful conviction.

Now, the voice Austin had recalled with dread had a calm, friendly, even warm, tone.

Wase asked to meet Austin--face to face. He offered to buy drinks and dinner.

Then a question Austin couldn’t process at first: “He said, ‘Mike, could you give me a hug? I need a hug to know that everything is all right.’ ”

Austin’s lower lip trembles as he talks about the call--and the courtroom shouts long ago. “I can’t forget that,” he says of Wase’s combative courtroom manner.

But a hug? He didn’t know what this meant for his former antagonist, or himself. Could he do this?

But imagining the blueprint he would follow to reconstruct his life, he wondered: Could he not do it? Would he let anger and vengeance run his post-prison life?

“Part of me figured that if I could hug the guy who put me in prison, I could get through anything out here. I don’t want to carry around bad karma and those negative feelings with me,” Austin said. “But I can’t forget what he put me through.

“I really didn’t know what to do.”

Michael Austin, 53, missed Cal Ripken’s entire professional baseball career. Ripken, the Baltimore Orioles’ iron man, broke in in 1981 and retired last year.

During Austin’s imprisonment, the Soviet Union died, a free South Africa was born, and five presidential administrations served.

His long ordeal grew out of a breakdown in the criminal justice system at his 1975 trial for the murder of a grocery store guard during a robbery.

At that time, Austin was an iron pourer; a time card showed he was at work at the time of the murder, but his defense attorney didn’t make full use of it.

The arrest was based on an identification by a store clerk who told detectives the shooter was a light-skinned black man about 5-feet-8. Austin is 6-feet-5 and dark-skinned.

No credible evidence pointed to his guilt, but when the store clerk told the jury Austin was the man who pulled the trigger, he was convicted.

Retelling the story makes the bookish-looking Austin shake his head.

“I just can’t imagine what that jury was thinking.”

Austin’s attorneys are exploring the best avenue toward financial compensation for the wrongful imprisonment.

But for now, the trial and jail sentence are a nightmare seen in a rearview mirror.

With 27 years to make up, Austin says feelings of vengeance and self-pity wouldn’t be a productive use of time. He needs every second to reconnect to a world without prison bars.

After his release, Austin moved in with his girlfriend, Yvonne Rahman, whom he first met while in prison in 1978.

What used to be a small parlor in her northwest Baltimore colonial now looks like a recording studio. A keyboard and trumpet share space with microphone stands, music books, mixers, amplifiers, recorders.

With his massive hands caressing piano keys, Austin says, “This is how I kept my balance in prison. Getting music right takes discipline and focus and concentration. I had to use all of those to get by every day.”

It’s 7 o’clock at night. The big man with the trumpet sitting on the bar stool in the wood-paneled basement is Wendall Shepherd. He has seen the big time, touring with acts like Parliament/Funkadelic and Angela Bofill.

Right now, he’s counseling Austin, who is searching for an elusive note on his own trumpet.

“Calm,” Shepherd says. “Just let it flow.”

At a keyboard is Glenn Grainger. He served in prison with Austin from 1977 to 1979. Grainger had a degree in music and, seeing Austin’s interest in playing, he taught him to read scales, to distinguish a C flat from a C sharp.

“I just wanted to give them something positive to do,” Grainger says, “and it took off from there.”

When Grainger’s sentence was up, he took a job at the city’s water treatment plant but kept playing with local bands through the ‘80s and ‘90s. Then one night, on the television news, he saw a familiar face and name. The story said Austin was getting out of prison after being wrongly convicted.

Grainger called Austin’s lawyer, and they met again.

“I told him this was like something out of the movies, getting together after all this time,” Grainger says. “He said he wanted to do something with music, and it clicked. I always worked with a band, but I said with Mike out, if he kept up his skills, we could take it to another level.”

The goal is to get a job at a mid-sized club in Baltimore sometime this summer. Later, if the right people take a liking to the group, maybe there could be a recording contract.

That’s why Austin, Shepherd, Grainger and a few others are practicing, bantering, pushing each other toward the next level, into the early morning.

“I think we can make it big,” Austin says.

Yvonne Rahman can remember the day she met Austin behind the walls of the Maryland Correctional Institution in Hagerstown.

She was visiting as a prisoner aide, helping inmates with writing projects.

He was writing a play.

“I was married at the time so I wasn’t interested in him like that. But Michael isn’t the kind of person you can forget easily. He seemed like a special man.”

Rahman, a teacher with the Maryland Department of Education, helped Austin with the writing and staging of the play.

The pair lost touch with each other for several years until 1991, when Austin asked her to write the parole board on his behalf. He sent her records of the trial, police reports and other evidence pointing to his innocence.

She pored over it, dumbfounded. “I figured I had to be missing something,” Rahman says. “Anyone could see he didn’t do it. Absolutely nothing pointed to Michael.”

She turned amateur detective and began investigating Austin’s case in her off-hours. Now divorced, she resumed visiting Austin in prison and they wrote each other weekly.

In 1996, Centurion Ministries, a Princeton, N.J.-based group that seeks to free the wrongly convicted, took on Austin’s case.

Late last year, Circuit Judge John Carroll Byrnes wrote in a decision vacating the conviction that Austin’s trial “was plagued by multiple problems which, cumulatively, present the inescapable conclusion that he was denied a fair trial.”

Finally freed, Austin’s nephew offered to rent an apartment for his uncle. That day, Rahman made the offer he really wanted to hear.

“Yvonne said I could stay with her and I didn’t know what to say,” Austin recalled. “I wanted to. But I had so many things on my mind.

“I truly do love Yvonne,” he said. “But we are taking it one day at a time. We kept in contact through visits and letters every week for 10 years. But now we have to really know each other.”

Austin and Rahman recently took Wase up on his invitation to dinner at a steakhouse. “He had bought a trumpet for me,” Austin says.

After dinner, the three returned to Wase’s home and the ex-convict and the prosecutor settled in the den for a private chat.

“I told him he seemed a little uneasy and he said he just wanted me to reassure him we would be friends forever,” Austin recalls. “I said, ‘Yeah, man. We could.’

“Then he asked for his hug.” Austin said.

Wase won’t discuss the hug but expresses admiration for the man he sent to prison. “It amazes me that he’s not bitter,” he says.

“I don’t feel guilty about what happened but I do feel responsible. I feel responsible for every case I ever prosecuted,” Wase says.

“I know we are not perfect in deciding who goes free and who we send away, but when mistakes are made, we should try to correct them.”

Austin extended his arms for the hug. “The guy is huge and I could hardly get my arms around him. But I think it made him feel better.”

And that was that, another step for Austin toward putting the past behind him.

“I wasn’t sure I could do it,” he says, “but I did.”