All are in tears except Jones himself, who is beaming and calmly telling them everything is going to be all right.

Among those waiting for him are his elderly mother, his sister and a daughter, Bree, born eight months after he was dragged from the family home in handcuffs.

Late in the afternoon on Friday 20 November, 23 years and seven months after he was arrested, Robert Jones walks out of jail, with arms raised, to be engulfed by his family.

“It was wonderful, it's a beautiful feeling, I couldn't have dreamed of that feeling,” Jones tells me later.

“The burden of all this weight of being incarcerated was being lifted, like I wanted to fly - that's why I held my hands up, because I wanted to fly.”

I am meeting him the day after his release in a restaurant close to the home he once shared with his mother and siblings - his first trip to a restaurant for more than two decades.

In his hand is a smartphone his daughter has given him, which he struggles to use. When he was arrested the internet barely existed and mobile phones were the size of bricks.

He is wearing the new clothes they have just bought together.

I ask him what it was like to be in prison for so long.

“A complete nightmare actually, a real nightmare. You can't find the words in the dictionary to describe the cruelty,” he says.

 When you're in prison serving a life sentence, even for something you did do, life is just rough, man. It's a deeper, greater injustice when you're innocent. It's real tough.”

How did he get through it?

“My faith in God,” he replies. “And it's a true saying that the truth will set you free one day, when you can find it. And that was a problem for me, just finding the truth. The truth was buried so deep and God was able to reveal those things.”

His close relationship with 22-year-old Bree, his youngest child, has been built entirely on prison visits and phone calls that automatically cut off after 15 minutes.

“I'd get emotional and upset at the end of the call, when they say there's one minute left,” she says. “I'd have so much to say.”

The two were never able to have their photograph taken together, so Jones painted a picture instead. It shows Bree in a lab coat - she has been studying at university and is now about to graduate.