A wrongly convicted man — who spent nearly three decades in prison and was freed this week with the help of Golf Digest — said Friday he was able to keep his hopes up behind bars thanks to a quote from “The Shawshank Redemption.”
Valentino Dixon said the mantra: “Get busy living or get busy dying” uttered by protagonists Tim Robbins and Morgan Freeman in the 1994 prison film allowed him to stay strong during his 27 years in the Attica Correction Facility, serving a sentence for a murder he didn’t commit.
“It was things like that that resonated with me and kept my spirit strong,” he told NBC’s “TODAY” show.
During his time in jail, Dixon got back to his childhood love of drawing and began sketching golf courses. His work caught the attention of Golf Digest magazine in 2012, setting in motion a remarkable sequence of events that led to his release Wednesday.
“It’s indescribable,” Dixon said of his first 48 hours of freedom. “It’s so strange, but I’m adjusting slowly.”
His time in jail for the 1991 murder of 17-year-old Torriano Jackson on a Buffalo street corner was, “the worst nightmare I could imagine,” Dixon said.
“Prison is designed for punishment but when you’re innocent and the evidence is there but no one is listening or even paying attention and no one wants to review the evidence… it was just horrific,” he said.
But finally, the work of a group of Georgetown University students working on prison reform issues and an additional investigation led to a confession by the real killer, Lamarr Scott, who is doing 25 years in prison for an unrelated attempted murder.
“This is how god works, Dixon said. “You never know how its gonna happen, you got to hang in there and keep the faith.”
Dixon’s plans for the future involve appealing to Gov. Andrew Cuomo to rethink sentencing laws in New York.
He said that in a state with lighter sentencing guidelines he could have been out after 15 years instead of being slapped with 39 to life, “and the wrongful conviction wouldn’t have been as painful as it is right now.”
But even after his ordeal, Dixon said he isn’t mad at prosecutors or at Scott, the real killer.
“I had my moments where I was bitter and angry and frustrated, but I’m not angry at anybody right now,” he said.
Since his release, Dixon’s just been trying to adjust to daily life, which thankfully no longer includes eating prison gruel.
“I was just eating some watermelon and cantaloupe and some peeled oranges and my stomach was not used to this,” he joked. “Like, ‘what are you doing to me? You’ve been putting junk in me for 27 years!”
