After 17 Years, Freedom Is Granted, but an Error Is Unacknowledged

There is a memorable line at the end of “Call Northside 777,” a splendid 1948 film based on a true story. It's about a Chicago reporter who becomes convinced that an innocent man was sent to state prison for the murder of a police officer years earlier. He works relentlessly to right this terrible wrong. When the man is finally freed, the reporter, played by James Stewart, says to him, “It's a big thing when a sovereign state admits an error.”

Yes, it is. And it is a big thing that the sovereign state of New York inched closer on Wednesday to admitting a whopping error of its own. It may take a while before it gets all the way there, though.

On Wednesday, a woman and a man who had been in prison for a murder that federal investigators are convinced they did not commit walked out of the Bronx criminal courts building, and breathed freedom for the first time in nearly two decades.

Cathy Watkins, 44, and Eric Glisson, 37, were among several people found guilty in the 1995 killing of a livery cabdriver, a Senegalese immigrant named Baithe Diop. They were jailed in 1995, and convicted in 1997. She went to the Bedford Hills state prison for women in Westchester County. He did his time mostly at Sing Sing.

All along, staring at the prospect of 25 years to life behind bars, they insisted on their innocence. Of course, the jails are filled with inmates who say they didn't do it. But all signs suggest that Ms. Watkins and Mr. Glisson were telling the truth. As the federal authorities probed deeper than the Bronx district attorney's office apparently did, they became convinced that a miscarriage of justice had occurred.

Their evidence was “compelling,” an assistant district attorney, Nicole Keary, acknowledged on Wednesday in State Supreme Court in the Bronx. But the sovereign state wasn't quite ready to offer an unqualified concession. “I do have to do an investigation,” M s. Keary told Justice Denis J. Boyle. It could take 90 days. During that period, Ms. Watkins and Mr. Glisson will wear electronic monitoring bracelets.

But they were now free to go, the judge said. Ms. Watkins stood before him, lips in a tight smile. Mr. Glisson's face gave no hint of what he was thinking. In the seats behind them, relatives and friends applauded. Sitting among them, Ms. Watkins's daughter, Tyniqua, could not hold back sobs.

Tyniqua Watkins was 9 when her mother was taken from her 17 years ago. She now lives and works in Augusta, Ga., and has three daughters of her own. Anger wrestled with excitement for her on this day. “I'm just hurt, and I'm just disappointed,” she said. “I can't believe they did that to my mom.”

Cathy Watkins is evidence of the human capacity for reinvention.

At Bedford Hills, she studied hard and earned a bachelor's degree in sociology through a program run by Marymount Manhattan College. She did so w ell that she was named the class speaker at commencement exercises in 2009. Her senior thesis was a natural for her. It was on wrongful convictions.

Obviously, she can't get back those 17 years. But they weren't entirely lost. In prison, she summoned a resolve that sustained her. “Innocent or guilty,” she told me when I attended the 2009 commencement, “you can still grow to be a better person.”

Her lawyer at her trial, Noah Lipman, said that, as terrible as this may sound to some, the young woman who was his client “never would have gone on to higher education but for the unfortunate developments which brought her into the criminal justice system.”

Don't misunderstand: He never doubted her innocence, Mr. Lipman said. Nor did her present lawyer, Paul Casteleiro, who said she would live for the next few months in Putnam County with a family that has supported her.

After Justice Boyle set Ms. Watkins and Mr. Glisson free, it took nearly s even hours for them to clear remaining bureaucratic hurdles. But at last they emerged from the courthouse. She wore a white T-shirt that said in black letters, “I didn't do it.”

“I'm ready to move on,” she said, but felt as if she had “one foot still in the system and one foot out.” Indeed, the ordeal is not fully behind her or Mr. Glisson. There remains that investigation promised by Bronx prosecutors.

When the reporter in “Call Northside 777″ talks about how the sovereign state admitted error, he adds, “Remember this, there aren't many governments in the world that would do it.”

It is also worth remembering that this sovereign state hasn't done it, either. Not yet.

E-mail Clyde Haberman: haberman@nytimes.com