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ST. LOUIS — Lamar Johnson had already been in prison for 17 years when rock band Paramore released its song “Ain’t It Fun.�

I’m not sure when he first heard it. But he referenced it in a recent conversation.

Johnson has been a free man for almost a year. Last February, St. Louis Circuit Court Judge David Mason found him innocent of the 1994 murder of Johnson’s friend, Markus Boyd. Finding your way in the world after 28 years in prison for a crime you didn’t commit is no easy process.

But Johnson is finding his way. We emailed a few months ago after he “dipped his toes� in social media, starting a Facebook page.

“I’m doing well,� he told me in an email. “I’ve entered the real world and ‘It’s Fun,’ as Paramore sings. The good, the bad, and the ugly.�

The ugly truth of Johnson’s conviction, which was laid out in devastating fashion during his innocence trial before Mason, is there was a rush to judgment by St. Louis police, and specifically former Detective Joe Nickerson. The case was so full of errors that anybody who witnessed the trial had to wonder how many more people like Johnson are out there. How many more innocent men are in Missouri prisons, put there by detectives who withheld important facts and forced unreliable witness testimony?

Johnson may help us get an answer to that question. On Wednesday, he filed a federal civil rights lawsuit against the city of St. Louis, Nickerson and other former officers who worked on his case.

“With no motive or physical evidence tying him to the crime, Johnson was convicted because Defendants manufactured a case against him through the false and fabricated testimony of a lone, unreliable and coerced eyewitness and an unreliable and incentivized jailhouse snitch,� reads the lawsuit, filed by Johnson’s attorney, , and a .

The lawsuit is the “final chapter� of Johnson’s long mission to clear his name. But it’s about more than that, he says. It’s about using the evidence of police and prosecutorial misconduct, which were displayed in his innocence trial in late 2022, to put the entire system on trial for its failures.

“If there’s no accountability, there’s really no change,� Johnson told me this week in an interview.

Missouri has a law that provides a limited amount of compensation for people who have been wrongfully convicted, and only if the improper conviction was overturned through DNA evidence. That doesn’t apply in Johnson’s case. So to seek accountability, he now is seeking compensation from the city and the officers who ramrodded the bad case that sent him to prison.

Boyd was murdered in 1994, the year after the most homicides were recorded in St. Louis history. There was widespread public pressure at the time for police to do something — anything — to tamp down crime. They obviously did, in some cases, by rushing to justice.

“There was very little oversight back then,â€� Johnson says. “ÁñÁ«ÊÓƵ were able to do whatever they wanted to do.â€�

The result, at least in Johnson’s case, was devastating. His life was mostly robbed from him, and now he’s trying to pick up the pieces. As he presses his lawsuit, Johnson plans to go to college and continue his quest to help those who have been wronged by police and courts.

“I’m holding on,� Johnson says. “I’m in a good place. I’ve got my freedom and am continuing the push for justice.�