Henrietta Washington waited for hours inside a white SUV parked just across the street from the brick walls, eyes fixed on a single brown door.

She’d already waited 25 years.

Her son, Sean Washington, and another man, Kevin Baker, were set to come out a back door at New Jersey State Prison in Trenton any minute after an appeals court threw out their convictions for a 1995 double murder in Camden, finding new evidence obliterated the testimony of the lone eyewitness.

“You know when you want to be excited about something?” said the woman known to many in Camden simply as Mama Hank. “But you feel as if something’s gonna go —”

She paused.

“You know that hallway is just across the street, but then you’re standing here and you’re thinking how he could get hit (by a car) coming across the street?”

Her eyes welled. She wore her favorite color for comfort. A purple sweatsuit and purple ball cap. Purple nails and a purple walking cane. Only her black shoes and a light blue puffy vest to keep out the cold lacked for purple.

“Twenty-five years,” she said with a sigh. “I can wait a little more.’”

Baker and Washington, both now 48, were convicted at a two-day trial in 1996 in what the prosecutor at the time described as a “one-witness case.” There was no motive. Police never recovered any guns.

A local woman, Denise Rand, was hazy on the details but told jurors she saw the two men run up to a man and woman standing in a courtyard, Rodney Turner and Margaret Wilson, and shoot them in the head before running off into the night at the city’s Roosevelt Manor apartment complex.

Their case was the subject of a two-part NJ Advance Media series in 2015 that chronicled the efforts of the Last Resort Exoneration Project, a legal group devoted to investigating wrongful conviction cases at Seton Hall University School of Law in Newark, which commissioned ballistics testing and uncovered forensic evidence undermining Rand’s version of events.

Just a day after Christmas 2019, a three-judge appellate panel ruled the new evidence “probably would have changed the jury’s verdict.” Prosecutors formally dropped the charges in February.

Authorities at the Camden County Prosecutor’s Office and the state Attorney General’s Office, whose conviction review unit briefly examined the matter after the appellate ruling, repeatedly declined to discuss the case on the record. In a statement, Camden prosecutors defended the convictions, saying their office disagreed with the appeals court but “respects the decision.”

Baker and Washington had hoped to be formally cleared in front of a judge in a Camden courtroom, where they had been given life sentences, but after fighting with prosecutors over terms, they instead would be quietly released out a back door of the prison just like any other inmate who maxed out their sentence or was granted parole.

State corrections officials refused to tell their families, or even their lawyers, when, exactly, they’d be let go, so a group of supporters stood vigil for more than eight hours, staring at the aging barbed wire and turrets of the maximum-security prison, eyes alighting every time the door opened for a shift change or medical transport.

The group grew restless and grumbled among themselves until a car horn alerted them to that brown door. Out walked Baker and Washington in prison-issued street clothes: white sneakers, loose-fitting jeans and baggy white button-down shirts.

“Finally, finally!” Baker shouted as he embraced one of his attorneys, Lesley Risinger.

“Yes sir, yes sir!” Washington replied, wrapping his mother in his arms.

Lesley and Michael Risinger, the husband and wife legal team that marshaled most of the evidence leading to their freedom, gave them sweatshirts and ball caps from Seton Hall Law School.

“No matter who you asked, no matter how hard you looked, you couldn’t find anything that did anything but corroborate what they were saying,” Lesley Risinger said at an impromptu news conference in the middle of a Trenton side street when asked why they took up the pair’s case nearly a decade ago.

Kevin Baker, left, and Sean Washington leave prison as free men Wednesday after 25 years behind bars for a double murder they say they didn't commit. Michael Mancuso | NJ Advance Media for NJ.com

A 25-year legal battle

Both men have long maintained that neither pulled the trigger.

Baker claims he was nowhere near the scene. Washington says he was the person who found the bodies while out trying to return a call to his pager — it was 1995, after all. He then called 911.

Baker and Washington had criminal records that included charges of drug crimes and violence, and Washington had earlier been charged with two other murders. He was acquitted in one murder case, and the other was dropped. Only the Roosevelt Manor charges stuck.

Their defense attorneys at the time told Baker and Washington not to take the stand to present their alibis, citing the state’s weak case against them. They later testified they did not adequately investigate their cases.

The Risingers took on Baker’s case in 2011. They say authorities, under pressure to solve cases amid spiraling violence in the mid-1990s, pegged Washington as the killer based on “street rumors” and, believing from an initial forensic report that there were two shooters, plucked Baker from a stack of mugshots seemingly “at random.”

Henrietta Washington put it more bluntly.

“They just wanted to put some black people in jail, and they just picked my son and his friend,” she said, again fighting tears. “I hope that never happens to nobody else’s child.”

In a written statement, acting Camden Prosecutor Jill Mayer noted that the office had successfully defended the convictions for decades in state and federal court before the appellate ruling.

In deciding to not to retry the men, Mayer said, authorities “considered the totality of the circumstances, including the passage of time and the impact it would have on retrying the defendants and proving the case beyond a reasonable doubt.

“Considering our mandate to pursue the interests of justice at all times, retrial after this length of time is not feasible in this particular case.”

Baker and Washington say they are not bitter. Washington said he believes his ordeal was “part of God’s plan” for him. But they both think the true story of what went sideways in their case needs to be told.

“This is heartwarming and all, but we did 25 years already, we did time for the crime really,” he said. “The story is what really went on. And that case should be exposed for what it was.”

“Ignorance gets a lot of us in prison and knowledge gets a lot of us out,” said Washington, who studied the law behind bars and became a prison paralegal. “The system, it needs to be revamped.”

Sean Washington greets family and friends Wednesday outside prison. Michael Mancuso | NJ Advance Media for NJ.com

‘Exonerated,’ but not yet ‘innocent’

A few dozen people welcomed Baker and Washington home Wednesday night at a party held at the Dare Academy, a Camden community center at the site of a former school run by Anthony Ways.

Ways has something in common.

He spent 13 years in prison for a 1989 murder, serving a life sentence that overlapped with Baker’s and Washington’s, before he was exonerated in 2005.

As friends and family shared pizza — the only thing the pair requested for their first meal outside — Baker and Washington were peppered with the same questions: How do you feel? What are you thinking? What are you going to do next?

Ways has been there.

“To be out, you’re almost wondering, ‘Is this real or not?'” he said.

Ways, who along with other members of the Camden community is helping secure housing and jobs for Baker and Washington, said for now, they need to “just chill, don’t do nothing, just get back the rhythm of society.”

It will be an adjustment for the pair, who had limited access to the internet behind bars but were locked up more than a decade before the iPhone came to market.

At the men’s welcome party, Baker’s cousin held up a phone so he could video chat with an old friend. But the man on the other end was having technical difficulties.

“You know I don’t know how to work it,” Baker said with a laugh.

As they adjust to life outside, they also face a potential court battle to clear their names — and get paid for their time.

Under state law, they could be entitled to $50,000 for each year they spent locked up, which would mean more than $1 million apiece. But to get it, they have to sue the state Treasury and — unless the state settles — demonstrate in a civil court “by clear and convincing evidence” that they are innocent.

In her statement, Mayer, the Camden prosecutor, noted the appeals court that threw out their convictions “did not declare Baker and Washington ‘actually innocent.’”

“Actual innocence” is a novel legal standard recognized by criminal courts in several states, including New York and Texas, that essentially acknowledges if a prisoner can demonstrate they didn’t commit the crime, judges should cast aside procedural barriers or technicalities and set them free.

Attorneys for Baker and Washington made an actual innocence argument in their case, but the appeals panel did not address the claim, which has not been recognized by a New Jersey criminal court, saying it was a question for the state Supreme Court.

“It’s not like there’s a mechanism in New Jersey for (a criminal court) to say, ‘We think this person is innocent,'” said Barbara O’Brien, editor of the Exoneration Registry, the most reliable national tracker of wrongful conviction cases.

O’Brien’s group uses the term “exonerated” for cases like Baker and Washington, where new evidence and other substantial proof led to overturned convictions, because in most jurisdictions, there is no way to “prove” innocence.

Asked whether they believed Baker and Washington to be “actually guilty,” a spokesman for the Attorney General’s Office, which installed Mayer as acting prosecutor after her predecessor retired, declined to comment.

A spokeswoman for Mayer, who declined to be interviewed, said “it is not appropriate for us to weigh in on the guilt or innocence of a defendant.”

The civil case could drag on for years.

The last two men to be exonerated for murder in New Jersey, Eric Kelley and Ralph Lee, were released in November 2017. They have yet to get paid, court records show.

As for their futures, Baker — who worked as a porter in the prison infirmary, helping sick and elderly inmates — says he’s keeping his options open, but whatever it is, he wants to help people.

Washington, who became a prolific jailhouse lawyer, is considering a legal career.

“I worked on other guys’ cases that were innocent, and they need help, too,” he said.

S.P. Sullivan may be reached at ssullivan@njadvancemedia.com. Follow him on Twitter. Find NJ.com on Facebook.