Two men incarcerated for a Floyd County murder they didn’t commit 25 years ago, are free this morning and will be spending their first Christmas with family in more than two decades.

Both were released Thursday immediately after the Rome Judicial Circuit District Attorney’s Office agreed with new evidence uncovered by the Proof Podcast and the Georgia Innocence Project.

For 25 years, Lee Clark sat in a jail cell knowing he was an innocent man. At age 17, he was wrongly implicated months after the death of 15-year-old friend Brian Bowling, in 1995, based on the testimony of two witnesses: one whose testimony was coerced by police investigators; and the other, a deaf man who didn’t know American Sign Language and his testimony in court was misinterpreted.

“It’s pointless to hold any hate about anything. I mean, I was mad about it for a lot of years. And for a lot of years, I did have a lot of hate for it,” Clark tells WSB ‘s Sandra Parrish.

>> More from WSB’s Sandra Parrish below.

Cain Storey, also 17 at the time, was the only one who really knew what happened. He watched his friend, Brian, lose a game of Russian roulette. Initially ruled an accident, investigators hatched a murder plot involving story and Clark.

“The main thing that hurt me this past quarter of a century is basically that the family would never know the truth because his family was like my family,” says Storey.

Susan Simpson, an attorney and co-host of the Proof Podcast, worked with the Georgia Innocence Project for two years to win the men’s release. She learned of their wrongful conviction through another case she was working on for a fellow inmate of Clark.

“As we began to look into it and talk to witnesses and eventually get files, which took forever because initially Floyd County claimed it had lost them all, it became clear to me that these two men were innocent,” she says.

The team brought the new evidence of police misconduct before the current district attorney who agreed the conviction should be overturned and charges dismissed against Clark. Storey still faced manslaughter charges for witnessing his friend’s death but was released with time served. His conviction will be officially wiped from his record under Georgia’s First Offender Act.

“I now have no ill will toward anybody—the state, the county, the detectives, the D.A., nobody,” says Storey.

Clark agrees.

“It was really low down what was done to me and Cain. But having that hate and toting it around, it accomplishes nothing,” he says.

Simpson says while both have family, they were released with just the clothes on their backs and no compensation from the state for the years they lost. She’s hoping Georgia lawmakers will step forward with a monetary award for the men. In the meantime, a GoFundMe page has been established for each.

Click here for Lee Clark’s GoFundMe.

And click here for Josh Storey’s GoFundMe.

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