Robert Dewey had lived a rough life. He served time for armed robbery and unlawful possession of a weapon. He had worked as a laborer and repairman, but by the mid-1990s, he was using drugs and hanging out on the fringes of a ragged group of methamphetamine users in western Colorado.

Then, in 1994, Jacie Taylor, a 19-year-old woman who had fallen into the same circle, was raped and strangled in her apartment in the town of Palisade, Colo. The police eventually homed in on Mr. Dewey, who had been staying nearby, and arrested him in June 1995.

Years later, DNA evidence would link the murder to Douglas Thames, who had also passed through Palisade. Mr. Thames has now been charged in Ms. Taylor’s death.

Mr. Dewey knew none of this in 1996 when he was sentenced to life in prison. It felt like a dream, he said, a grim movie in which he was the audience, not the protagonist. Next thing he knew, he was a convicted killer peering out a cell window at distant city lights glowing on the horizon.

“I didn’t know who did it,” he said. “Didn’t care at the moment. I just knew it wasn’t me.”

After years of work by his court-appointed lawyer, Danyel Joffe, the Innocence Project came on board in 2007 and paid for tests that showed no DNA links between Mr. Dewey and the crime scene. His conviction was reversed, and he was released last April. He left with an apology and a handshake from prosecutors in Mesa County, he said, but little else.

There have been moments of grace, like petting a dog, or touching a tree for the first time in more than a decade. But there have been mountains of difficulties.

Because Mr. Dewey had been sentenced to life, he said, he never touched a computer or took any vocational classes while he was in prison. He came out awe-struck by a world that had gone online and turned digital. The first time he walked into a Walmart, he said, he was so overwhelmed by its colors and scale that he had to run outside to smoke a cigarette.