On the trail to freedom

For Felipe Rodriguez, this Christmas will mark a kind of second birth, the first he celebrates in freedom that evidence overwhelmingly suggests should have been his for the 27 Christmases that came and went in the hellish confinement of the New York State correctional system.

All that seeming eternity, Rodriguez insisted on his innocence. All that time, the emptiness of the story that got him convicted of the brutal murder of Maureen McNeill Fernandez in the truck yard of a Queens warehouse awaited discovery.

During the grind of those long years, Rodriguez found the Catholic faith, which took embrace and never let him go. Then in a transformative instant, came the call from Gov. Cuomo. Came freedom.

The gratitude due to those who made his liberty and more possible is more than one man can properly express, so here’s an assist.

Nina Morrison of the Innocence Project, joining forces with criminal defense attorney Zachary Margulis-Ohnuma, painstakingly assembled the evidence Cuomo weighed in making the heavy choice to award clemency — and did so without the benefit of DNA that her organization often uses to make a case for exoneration.

Peter Ward, president of the New York Hotel & Motel Trades Council, made sure Rodriguez has a decent and dignified job, never mind the murder conviction that remains on his record. And then, there is Arthur Browne. Daily News readers may recognize that name — after all, it appears at the bottom of this page each day. This week, Brown departs as editor and publisher of the Daily News after four extraordinary decades with the paper — but not before returning to his professed greatest love in journalism, reporting the hell out of a great New York story.

Browne roamed the city from Ridgewood to Tottenville to retrace an ancient trail of tales purporting to account for how Rodriguez was convicted of killing McNeill Fernandez.

He crafted with an artisan’s care his account of severe punishment delivered so cavalierly on a man who almost surely did no wrong. Brought back to life, in words, a woman so brutally lost.

Demanded the attention of the world to injustices that may yet yield to repair.

Doing, in the end as ever, what the greatest journalists do.