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ST. LOUIS — ÁñÁ«ÊÓƵ were like three longtime buddies sitting down for chow time in prison.

Except none of them was wearing a gray or orange jumpsuit. There were no guards. And the food — Larry Callanan called it “real food.� Wings and fries. And some rolled-up corned beef contraption that Lamar Johnson was dipping in sauce.

“I don’t know what this is,� Johnson said Tuesday night, sitting in the back of Maggie O’Brien’s, which was packed with St. Louis Blues fans.

But he ate it, and he smiled, and he dug in for more.

Across from Johnson was Ricky Kidd, his old Jefferson City cellmate. The three men were all wrongfully convicted of murders they did not commit. They spent countless hours together in the prison law library to research their cases, sending letters to reporters and lawyers and trying to get anybody to pay attention.

When you’re in prison and you can’t get anybody to listen to you, it’s like “you get buried underneath the rubble,� Kidd said.

Kidd was the first to get exonerated, in 2019, with the help of the Midwest Innocence Project, which intervened in all three cases. Callanan was next, in 2020. And then, on Valentine’s Day 2023, it was Johnson’s turn for the courts to show him some love.

Circuit Court Judge David Mason found him of the 1994 killing of Marcus Boyd, which put him in prison for 28 years. Johnson was all smiles Tuesday night, celebrating with his attorneys and his close friends. But he’s also experiencing a roller-coaster of emotions about what happened to him over the past three decades, and what it’s going to take to begin a new life on the outside.

One of the reasons Johnson’s case attracted nationwide attention was the effort by Missouri Attorney General Eric Schmitt — now a U.S. senator — to keep Johnson in prison despite overwhelming evidence of innocence.

That evidence was similar to the cases of Kidd and Callanan, and so many of the 3,374 other names that have been added to the since 1989.

There was shoddy police work with a rush to judgment and a refusal to look at other suspects. There were bad identifications in photo and video lineups that prosecutors never should have presented to juries. There were unethical uses of jailhouse snitches. In Johnson’s case, the real killers of Boyd had confessed years earlier.

Every time new evidence piled up to back Johnson’s never-wavering claims of innocence, Schmitt would wave it off as too little, too late. The justice system loves its jailhouse snitches when it’s putting people in prison, but not so much when they come forward with tales of innocence.

“Winning at all costs was all that mattered to them,� Johnson said of the attorney general’s office.

That changed when Circuit Attorney Kim Gardner was finally allowed to present the evidence in a hearing. Mason, hearing all of that evidence, recognized that Johnson’s trial was a sham and an embarrassment to the court system.

Through it all, Johnson had Kidd and Callanan, and the two men never forgot their friend. They sat in Mason’s courtroom day after day during the December hearing. ÁñÁ«ÊÓƵ were there again Tuesday to hear the decision.

“I was more nervous waiting on the verdict in Lamar’s case than I was in my own,� Callanan said.

Now the two men will help their friend navigate life on the outside — with the freedom of not having to ask permission to do anything, but also with the challenges of finding work and purpose and reconnecting with family.

“It’s just like going inside a prison for the first time,� Johnson said. “You have fear of the unknown. Now I have to try to make a life.�

He paused with the look of a man who has been to hell and back and knows he is up for the next challenge. “I can survive.�