When dinner was over, he ordered a coffee, to go.

A trip to WalMart for the incidentals needed on the outside was aborted when word came that the district attorney expected Mr. Fisher to be already gone. His lawyers promised an early start the next day, and he went to sleep in a hotel at the city’s edge.

In the morning, his latest defense lawyer, Perry Hudson, gave him a farewell gift, a portable MP3 player. Mr. Fisher had wanted a Walkman, a hot item back when he was last free, but Mr. Hudson explained that this was better.

Then Mr. Fisher got into the passenger seat of a small red rental car that soon blended into the southward flow of Interstate 35. As the radio played hip-hop, the exhausted, exhilarated man gazed through the car window at a different country from the one he remembered.

“It looked like the society outside had become cleaner, shinier,” he said.

What Mr. Fisher, 46, remembered included this: abandoned as a small child, fobbed off to relatives, returned to an abusive father and dumped at 13 on the doorstep of the New York State child-welfare system, which cut him loose at 16. In and out of the Navy in seven months, he bobbed through the drugs and street life of the South, until he found a bus ticket to Tulsa and drifted, finally, into Oklahoma City.

There, on Dec. 12, 1982, a white man named Terry Neal was stabbed to death in his apartment with the broken neck of a wine bottle. A juvenile known to solicit on the streets was charged with the murder, but that changed when he named Mr. Fisher as the assailant. He said that Mr. Neal had picked the two of them up for sex, but that things had gone wrong.