As dusk fell around him and the mosquitoes began to forage over his aunt's front yard, Michael Anthony Green was unequivocal about one thing: He wants to meet the woman whose sudden scream sent him unjustly to prison for 27 years.

Time has passed and much of the anger that fueled his passion to learn the law as an inmate has diminished. But the 45-year-old Green is still as anxious as he was in 1983 to understand why the victim of a sexual assault fingered him as the perpetrator, an accusation finally refuted for good when DNA revealed four other men as her attackers.

"She knew I wasn't the one," Green said Friday evening, only hours after walking out of Harris County Courthouse a free man. "She shouldn't have picked me. She had said it wasn't me a week earlier."

Green said he was told by a prosecutor that the woman, who is not being named by the Chronicle, is truly sorry and promises to write a letter to Gov. Rick Perry urging that Green be granted a pardon as quickly as possible.

"I thank her for that," Green said, "but I still want to know why."

Green said he realizes that the woman may have felt pressure by police to settle on a culprit, and he accepts that the live and photo lineups she was shown likely were tainted by her having seen him on the night of the crime. He knows that this may explain why she picked him, despite her having said on the night of the assault that he was not one of her attackers.

But still Green is haunted by the scream of apparent recognition she let out when the line of men was paraded before her in the bright light on April 26, 1983.

Outrage boiled over inside him then, he said, and there is still a flash of it in his eyes. In that instant, his life changed.

Throughout the trial and the long prison sentence that followed it, Green has clung to the belief that this brutally attacked woman, in her heart of hearts, has known all along that he didn't do it.

"I don't want to hear excuses," he said. "Are you saying that if someone robs you, because the cops keep putting my picture in front of you, that's going to make you pick me? That does not justify her actions."

'Just happy to be free'

As he headed inside to some long-overdue barbecue and the loving crush of an ecstatic family, Green was clearly weary of telling his story. But he vowed to repeat it again and again if it would keep another person from the same fate.

He showed little interest in talking about how times have changed, how soon he would have a Face­book page, or what flavor ice cream he missed the most.

"Those types of things don't enter my mind. I'm just happy to be free."

Hours earlier, Green faced a similar grilling as he stepped into the afternoon Houston heat, free for the first time since being picked up on suspicion of stealing a car a week after the rape victim had been assaulted. His eyes darted around the throng of reporters and relatives waiting to hear his story.

He spoke in spurts and talked with his hands, alternating between prison slang and the language of a law student. It was not until he mentioned his mother, who died in 2004, that his voice caught in his throat. Missing her funeral, he said, was his saddest moment in prison.

"She was one of the things that kept me really sane in prison. That's why I almost went all the way off when she died and they wouldn't let me go to her funeral."

Green was freed after jailhouse interviews and DNA testing returned this week showed conclusively that he was not one of the four men who abducted and sexually assaulted a woman in the Greenspoint area in 1983.

None of the men implicated can be prosecuted because of the statute of limitations. Asked if he was angry, he answered quickly, "That would come natural for doing time for something you didn't do."

One last day's delay

Thin and dressed in a green polo shirt, Green emerged from the Harris County Jail, where he had had to spend an extra night after an outburst led officials to cancel a Thursday morning court hearing, to a bear hug from his brother.

"It felt good, just being near him, just seeing him," said Adrian Taylor, 50. "It's something that you really can't express after all this long time."

Asked how he lived day-to-day in prison knowing that he was innocent, Green said, "That's how I lived — day by day - trying not to think about my situation, trying not to think about it."

He dealt with it, he said, by spending his time learning about the law.

"I channeled my anger into studying the law whereas this would never happen to me ever again."

Earlier in the day, visiting state District Judge Mike Wilkinson ordered Green's release on a no-cash personal bond while the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals rules on his actual innocence.

Grateful to the DA's office

Friday, Green was all smiles as he complimented the Harris County District Attorney's Office.

He credited by name prosecutor Alicia O'Neill and investigator J.J. Freeze with finding a pair of jeans stored in a warehouse that had been worn by the victim during the crime, then testing it for DNA evidence. The results excluded Green.

"The first thing I'd like to do is to thank the DA's office. They pushed and pushed and pushed to try to get it on through. Outside of that, I thank my lawyer," he said as he hugged attorney Bob Wicoff.

Wicoff has blamed Green's conviction on slapdash police work.

Green, then 18, was identified by the victim in a photo array and a lineup after she saw him from the back of a police car and initially said he was not involved.

He was sentenced to 75 years in prison.

mike.tolson@chron.com

brian.rogers@chron.com