Black man wrongly jailed for 39 years freed

Authorities have freed a South Carolina manwho served 39 years in prison for a murder that they now say he didn’t commit. “I am free,” The Herald of Rock Hill quoted James Robert McClurkin as saying. “The air. It smells different. Like freedom.” McClurkin, 61, left Broad River Prison on Thursday as a parolee after police and prosecutors said he did not kill 74-year-old Claude Killian of Chester in August 1973. “I have been trying for 39 years…to try and get someone, anybody, to believe me,” McClurkin said. McClurkin said he blames race—he’s black and the victim was white—for the conviction. The jury, the prosecutor and the judge were white. “What happened in 1977?” he said. “I was black and I got life, that’s what happened.”