JAMES BAIN: WE HAVE TO TRUST EACH OTHER; CAN'T TRUST THE OUTSIDE

James Bain, 54, was just 19 years old when he was convicted in 1974. He's always maintained his innocence, and now as a result of help from the Innocence Project of Florida, a nonprofit organization that helped represent Bain and funded the DNA testing, the results proved it. He was finally released this week.

On March 4, 1974, the 9-year-old victim was sleeping between his sister and brother when a man silently stole through his bedroom window and took him to a nearby baseball field.

According to court records, the boy awoke and his abductor - whom he later described as a young man of 17 or 18 with a mustache, beard and sideburns - ordered him to take off his pants and raped him. The young man ran away, and the boy returned home, wearing a white T-shirt and underwear, which contained semen.

The boy told authorities James Bain was the perpetrator. But Miller says the identification was a mistake. In the boy's mind, Bain had become the attacker. The boy's uncle, an assistant principal at Bain's school, told the boy his description sounded like Bain. And when authorities showed him photos of several young men, the boy said he was asked to pick out not his attacker but "Jimmie" Bain.

They'd been watching the family's color television - Bain's Christmas gift to his mother - when police knocked on their door

They told his siblings they wanted to take Bain to the police station to ask him some questions, so he left with police. Bain was convicted in the courtroom of judge Oliver Greene in 1974.

The victim, now 45, lives in Central Florida but could not be reached for comment. The victim's father told the St. Petersburg Times that his son "is very upset by the news."

The victim served in the Marine Corps for five years in his 20s, but later fell apart, and told his father he "couldn't shake the rape." According to Florida Department of Corrections records, the victim has spent time behind bars for various offenses, including cocaine possession and grand theft.

Bain's mother is 77 years old now and in a wheelchair.
Upon his release, she said, "I didn't think I was going to see this day,"

In the book, to be released February 2, 2010, "Black Men Stop!" Chapter TWO, "The Outside," I discuss that we must be able to trust each other because we can not often times trust the outside--police & criminal justice. I urge black men to stop hurting each other and our communities with violence, s*x and abandonment of their children; that we need each other.

Gail Smallwood, author "Black Men Stop!"
http://tinyurl.com/blackmenstop