He was in prison for 19 years for a murder he didn't commit. Suddenly, he was free.

Stillwater prison's automatic doors slid open, and Marvin Haynes stepped out into the biting December cold, finally able to "breathe real."

After two decades behind bars for a murder he didn't commit, he felt instant relief and an all-consuming urge to get away.

But first: A blur of his closest friends and family encircled Haynes, pulling him to their chests and cupping his cheeks. Words failed him. He stared over their heads to where a distant smokestack loomed, crowned with lights. For years, he'd gazed out a crack in the covered window of his third-floor cell at a mysterious beacon in the sky. Now that he was out, he could finally trace it to the Allen S. King power plant rising above the bluffs of the St. Croix River.

That morning — Dec. 11, 2023 — a judge's order had validated what Haynes had been saying since he was 16 years old: He'd been wrongfully convicted in a flawed case based on faulty evidence. Now, he was returning to the world a 36-year-old man.

His lawyers rushed him straight from Stillwater to a hastily called news conference at the Hennepin County Government Center. Surrounded by an army of well-wishers, Haynes lifted his sister and advocate, Marvina Haynes, into the air as tears flowed down her face.

They hurried next to an assisted care facility in north Minneapolis where Haynes' mother, Sharon Shipp, moved after a series of strokes left her nonverbal. The strokes had been the result of stress, the family has long held, over her eldest son's incarceration. Haynes kissed his mother on the cheek, and let nieces he'd never met drum their fingers on his bald head.

Dinner that night was his lawyers' treat, a feast at Fhima's in downtown Minneapolis. From a menu that offered New York strip and seafood tagine, Haynes ordered the cheeseburger. He'd craved a good one for about two decades.

For weeks afterward, there were parties, Christmas at home for the first time in forever, his face printed on a sheet cake, news spots and guest speaker engagements at law schools.

Haynes was recognized in the checkout lane of the grocery store. Fox 9 strapped him into a roller coaster at the Mall of America — allegory for his newfound liberty — and he played along despite his fear of heights. Activists, media personalities and childhood friends he barely remembered materialized by his side, grabbing selfies.

He'd spent more than half his life behind bars, booked for a curfew violation that evolved, nightmarishly, into a murder conviction in the 2004 killing of north Minneapolis flower shop clerk Randy Sherer.

Sherer was gunned down by a would-be robber who left no murder weapon, fingerprints, DNA or surveillance footage to identify him. Over the objections of the lead police investigator, prosecutors used shaky eyewitness testimony to construct a case against Haynes, who was tried as an adult and sentenced to life in prison.

The teen's final outburst in court: "I didn't kill that man! They're all going to burn in hell for that."

Now, at last, Haynes had woken up from the nightmare. But after freedom came new hardships.

There was no family wealth waiting to help ease his re-entry, and no time to reckon with the psychological toll of nearly 20 years' wrongful imprisonment. In Haynes' first year of freedom, he had to scramble to stand as an independent adult, learn new technology, mend damaged relationships and battle bouts of melancholy.

Haynes later reflected that the attention lavished on him in the early days had been a bit much. He felt changed by prison in ways that others didn't seem to understand. He carefully considered those he allowed to get close, and pushed away a lot of smoke and drink, he said, because he was already "high on life."

"I didn't fight that hard to get out here just to go back to the same lifestyle," he said. "No, I gotta be thinking."

Three months after he left prison, Haynes flew to New Orleans with his sister Marvina and lawyer Andrew Markquart with the Great North Innocence Project to attend the Innocence Network Conference. The event brought together hundreds of people exonerated through the discovery of new evidence, DNA breakthroughs and accuser recantations. Like Haynes, many had been freed through the work of Innocence Projects' pro-bono investigative lawyers.

The conference was a whirlwind weekend of bonding for exonerees, punctuated by clubbing on Bourbon Street. Men cried over the course of the event. Others lashed out.

Haynes was proud of himself for handling his emotions.

"I'm not gonna judge nobody, but different people handled trauma different," he said. "There were some people there, wrongly convicted, they lost their minds. … I just thank God I've still got my sanity."

Haynes eschewed psychological help. Instead, he launched himself into 2024 like an alien new to Earth, endlessly fascinated by the ordinary, humdrum side of life.

His first iPhone exposed him to the addictive power of the screen. He learned he should not trust every sob story on Facebook, but that he could learn how to do anything on YouTube. He started eating too much fatty food and put on unwelcome weight.

He saw a country changed by a decade of racial upheaval that Stillwater inmates could only follow on TV. From Trayvon Martin to George Floyd, history-making protests introduced a wave of consciousness about Black America that was absent from the culture when he'd gone away.

The local news taught him to heed the scrutiny of minor celebrity.

Myon Burrell, a south Minneapolis man who'd also been convicted of murder as a teenager and whose life sentence was commuted in 2020 after an Associated Press investigation, was back in the spotlight after police found an illegal gun and drugs in his car.

The prospect of ever returning to prison horrified Haynes.

"You can't be focusing on the wrong stuff out here," he said.

Haynes had an inherent sense of what he needed to do to get to where he wanted to go. He pictured a nice townhouse somewhere outside the city where he could see the stars, because for most of his life, he did not have the choice to go outside at night and gaze up at the sky. He wanted companionship, but likely no kids — he couldn't imagine bringing a son, in particular, into a world so "cruel."

He wanted to get back the money garnished from his prison wages and paid to the Department of Corrections each year for the cost of his confinement. A state law entitled exonerees to $50,000 for each year of their wrongful incarceration. He felt entitled to that, too. And he yearned for some kind of contrition from the people who cheered his arrest in 2004.

But these were bitter thoughts, and he weighed the cost of pursuing them down despairing roads he'd intentionally blocked off.

"I can't be worried about the past," Haynes would tell himself. "People that done that to me, they've got to answer to somebody higher."

"Culture shock" usually follows exoneration, said Innocence Project spokesperson Hayley Drozdowski-Poxleitner. The wrongly incarcerated often say they can sense the abiding suspicion of other people, wondering if they were released on technicalities rather than actual innocence. There are few places to turn: Not many are sufficiently specialized to work with their issues.

"You arrive in a new place, it's kind of this euphoria," she said. "You're there and you're on the high, but then as time wears on and the glitter of it all sort of starts to fade, you are smacked in the face with the reality of it."

People who serve the normal course of a prison sentence get months to plan their return to society. Those who are exonerated often get just a few days to map out a new life.

Haynes had to find a place to live. His five adult sisters had their own families. He didn't want to be a burden. Plus, his relationships did not survive incarceration intact.

Years passed without talking to some family members. Their support was always "going in and out of my life," he said, because "they didn't know what to do, at a certain point."

Even after his release, Haynes felt uncomfortable with the way his sisters looked at him, as though they expected to find the little boy who was taken away still alive in him somewhere.

"I would have rather gone to a shelter before I lived with one of my family members," Haynes said. "We ain't as close as we was. Like that stuff traumatized me. It affected everybody, not just me, but my whole family."

Haynes' ex-wife, Shannon Haynes, invited him to move into her Brooklyn Center apartment.

Shannon had been a childhood friend of Haynes' younger brother. They struck up a prison romance, which led to a 2017 wedding, and a divorce the following year.

Despite the difficulty of maintaining a relationship with one partner behind bars, Shannon faithfully helped Haynes promote his story. She built his first website, visited him on weekends and stuck by him when it seemed everyone else turned their backs.

One night during the winter of Haynes' release, Shannon fried fish for dinner as Haynes sorted through the few possessions he'd brought out of Stillwater: legal papers and letters he had written to advocacy organizations.

It was their first time actually living together, and there was friction. Shannon was busy, working in health insurance by day, studying for a master's degree by night and raising two small children of her own.

Haynes wasn't always emotionally present. Recently, he had been rewatching the entire tape of his 2004 interrogation by Minneapolis police on YouTube. He pulled up it up at dinner one night, the audio blaring over the conversation.

In the video, Haynes was a scrawny 16, hair askew, seemingly unaware of the gravity of his situation until investigators abandoned innuendo and started accusing him of murder. That's when he flattened himself against the wall, wailing that they were wrong. His mom would be furious, he said, once she heard how they were treating him.

"I did not know at that point that I'd be spending 19 years in prison," said Haynes as he stared at the TV. "I was so confident because I only heard about people in jail that's supposed to be [there]. I was like, "Man, this ain't never gonna happen to me.'"

Lately it had hit him just how young he'd been when his life changed forever.

At the start of his sentence, he constantly told people he was innocent — and they would look at him like he was crazy, he said. He fought and argued with correctional officers, earning a transformative stint in solitary confinement.

After that, he started listening to the old-timers, who told him to rewire his brain around the singular mission of proving his innocence through the courts. He earned a GED and hit the law library.

Turning exoneration into his reason for being gave Haynes not just the motivation to wake up in the morning, but something resembling actual joy. He said other inmates found it unsettling to see him walking around with a smile on his face.

In public, he would often insist that he really wasn't mad at anyone for what happened to him because "these things been happening before I was even alive."

But watching those recordings now, on the outside, Haynes felt unexpected pangs from an unfamiliar place.

He suddenly fell silent. Without explanation he switched to an NBA video game and started jamming the buttons. As though sensing the mood shift, Shannon's little white dog leapt onto Haynes' chest, lapping the tears pooling at the corners of his eyes.

Not long after, he and Shannon separated.

Haynes was determined to live alone, get his driver's license and earn a real wage for the first time in his life.

In prison he earned about $200 a month packaging balloons. After his release, a temp agency found him a job in Boston Scientific's Arden Hills warehouse making $17.50 an hour. He got forklift certified and learned how to use a computer to track the shipment and receipt of medical supplies.

Haynes' boss Scott Link recalled that they were eating lunch one day when out of nowhere, Haynes announced he'd just gotten out of prison after more than 19 years. Link had questions but didn't pry. When Haynes said he'd been wrongfully imprisoned, Link wasn't sure what to make of that either. Then Haynes started talking about attending hearings at the Capitol.

"Now I gotta actually go on Google and see what's going on," Link said. "Now it all came together."

On the day of Sherer's murder, his sister Cynthia McDermid had also been working in the family flower shop and had talked with the killer before he stuck a revolver in her face. McDermid, who escaped after Sherer popped out of a back room to intervene, described the shooter as a Black male nearly 6 feet tall, 180 pounds, with "close-cropped" hair.

Asked to select him out of a photo lineup, McDermid pointed to a man later found to have been out of the town at the time of the murder. She was asked to choose again, this time from a photo lineup that included Haynes.

Police had an up-to-date mugshot of Haynes — sporting a spiky Afro — after arresting him over missing a court summons for violating curfew. Instead, they used an older photo showing him with short hair.

McDermid picked Haynes, a boy about half a foot shorter and 50 pounds lighter than the man she initially described. Later, when she was given a live lineup, police called Haynes up by name while all the other teens in the lineup were identified numerically. McDermid chose Haynes again, sealing his fate as primary suspect.

At trial, Assistant Hennepin County Attorney Mike Furnstahl called a slew of teenagers to testify about various rumors linking Haynes to the murder.

One failed to identify Haynes in the courtroom and led investigators to the house of a different north Minneapolis boy named Marvin. Another had to be threatened with prosecution if he did not cooperate.

Former officer Michael Keefe said at Haynes' evidentiary hearing last winter that out of his thousands of felony cases, Haynes' conviction was the only one he doubted. A few weeks later, the Innocence Project and the Hennepin County Attorney's Office jointly asked Judge William Koch to vacate it. Koch obliged, saying the eyewitness identification had been badly conducted even by the standards of 20 years ago.

The case of Sherer's murder will remain closed pending any new information or leads, according to the Minneapolis Police Department.

Now that he was free, Haynes faced headaches of an entirely different nature.

To keep his job in Arden Hills, he needed a driver's license — but struggled to clear the hurdles, failing the written test several times.

He shopped for apartments and was shocked at the rents. A lawyer friend offered him use of her condo, but he chose instead to start building a rental history with a modest one-bedroom in Brooklyn Center.

Some days he could hardly believe that he could have something as wonderful as his own bed in his own home, with the key in his own hand.

Haynes agonized over asking for a raise at work, not sure how these things were done. He was convinced he had to move his mother into a better care facility, and needed money to do it. On one of his visits to bring her takeout and cigarettes, he learned her TV had been out of order for months but no one had tried to fix it.

He bought her a new one as soon as he got paid.

When Haynes dwelled on his mother's living arrangements, he sometimes resented his siblings' inability to provide better. He had a falling out with one sister, who wanted to enlist him for her fledgling advocacy organization, because he wasn't comfortable supporting the innocence claims of just anyone.

Wary of shortcuts, he stayed in his temp job, hoping it would beget a permanent career. Boston Scientific eventually raised his wage to $19.75 an hour.

One night Haynes dropped in on his older sister Marquita Haynes at her home in north Minneapolis. As they talked together on the couch, Marquita was honest with her brother.

When he was in prison, he was so focused on his own struggle that he didn't appreciate the battles his sisters fought on the outside. When he asked for money, they couldn't always get it to him right away because they had bills to pay, kids' birthdays to observe and doctor appointments to keep.

"You gotta think what I was going through," Haynes protested.

"That's understandable, but you got to understand out here, too, Marvin," she said. "I'm glad he can see, it ain't as easy as he thought it was."

Haynes took that in. Before he left, he quietly checked whether Marquita needed any help that month. She told him she was all right.

This year, Gov. Tim Walz signed a change into state law allowing the review of new evidence establishing core facts of a case, even if they're discovered more than two years after a conviction is finalized.

Haynes had advocated for the change alongside the Innocence Project. In his case, had Hennepin County Attorney Mary Moriarty not agreed to waive the statute of limitations, he would never have gotten an evidentiary hearing. Legislators from both parties expressed remorse following his testimony.

"I'm not trying to brag, but it's just crazy to me to know, like, the law that prevented me from getting justice is the law that I assisted to help change," Haynes said later.

"Man, that's a blessing in my name."

On Nov. 5, Haynes arrived at his Brooklyn Center polling center to register as a first-time voter. His objective: Cast a ballot against U.S. Sen. Amy Klobuchar, the Hennepin County Attorney at the time of his prosecution.

"I'm paying taxes, too," he said, flashing an "I Voted" pin.

The following week, Haynes sued for state damages — at least $100,000 for each year of his imprisonment.

He plans to confront the city of Minneapolis in federal court for more in damages before year's end.

Haynes' lawyers are Neufeld Scheck Brustin Hoffmann and Freudenberger, the civil rights team that won a $21 million settlement for Craig Coley, California's longest-incarcerated exoneree.

Emma Freudenberger, one of the partners, said that as much as the evidence in his case "pops off the page," it was Haynes' character that convinced her team he would make a good client.

For all the hurdles that vexed Haynes over the year, he was working a steady job and paying rent on his own within months of his release. Freudenberger said that showed him to be more resilient than many exonerees who go into the system older, or have more material support waiting for them upon their release.

"It speaks to this positivity and determination," she said, "and his strong desire to just pick up and lead a normal life and experience normal, everyday joys."

This fall, Haynes started seeing a therapist, acknowledging he was lying to himself when he thought he didn't need it.

The future seemed bright when he imagined its long arc. He dreamed of writing a tell-all book, inspiring a movie, attending business school and taking speech classes.

But all those things were on hold. There were bills to pay and he could barely afford rent.

Haynes eventually passed the written driving exam and signed up for the road test in early fall, feeling confident.

It didn't last; the instructor docked him for driving too close to the center line, which he thought was an unfair nitpick.

It was weeks before he could get an appointment to try again.

Haynes rushed to the Arden Hills testing station after work for a 4 p.m. slot. He pulled up to the window at 4:06 — one minute past the 5-minute grace period. The clerk insisted he had to reschedule.

Haynes begged for a break. "I've been trying to do this for months," he said. "You know how hard it was to get a ride to come and do this? … I'm trying to get my license so I won't have to get pulled over. I'm trying to do everything right!"

The workers said he could go to Buffalo for the next available appointment. Haynes grabbed his permit in a huff and left. Every time an appointment opened within a reasonable distance, he had to call in a favor from somebody with a license to take off work and accompany him. He couldn't just reschedule another test 45 miles away.

Haynes apologized for losing his temper, and then he pulled away through the misting rain.