Somehow, 25 years of prison hasn’t hardened Joel Alcox. At age 52, he has the same gentle handshake and easy chuckle as he did when he was convicted of murder as a young Lompoc rocker. Apologizing as he slipped on reading glasses to text his new wife, he’s still unfailingly polite. Only his thick prison yard muscles under a Mickey Mouse T-shirt betray where he’s been.
In mid-May, Alcox and I sat at a Starbucks near his home in San Bernardino. He’d just finished another long day of delivering tires. He rubbed his cramping legs. The sun was setting, it was cold, but he chose a table on the front patio to sip coffee. He liked being outside and sitting where he pleased after decades under lock and key. “It’s the little things,” Alcox said.
A week earlier, on May 11, in the same courtroom where he was convicted, a Santa Maria judge overturned his sentence of 25 years to life for the 1986 shooting death of a Lompoc motel owner. The stunning ruling in an otherwise long-forgotten case marked a major victory in the tireless fight to prove Alcox’s innocence, and it cast a dark shadow of doubt over the police and prosecutors who’ve been accused of putting the wrong man behind bars. Friends and family huddled around Alcox and sobbed. “It was a joyous day,” he said.