It has been 20 months since Ronald Keith Williamson was exonerated and freed from death row in Oklahoma, where he spent the better part of nine years pacing back and forth in his 9-by-11-foot cell, screaming that he did not rape and kill a young woman in a town called Ada. Ravaged by mental illness and the anguish of his time in prison, he is unable to hold a job and lives in a group home in Oklahoma City.

The state made no reparations for the mistake that turned him from a high-school baseball hero into a condemned man, No. 134846, other than to mail him the standard $50 check given to all inmates who are destitute upon release. Now Williamson recreates his old prison boundaries in the group home by pacing back and forth in his room. His one solace is playing the guitar. Death row, he says, taught him how to play the blues.

Williamson, 47, spent nine years on death row for the rape and murder of a young woman. Williamson, who suffers from manic depression, was  convicted on the basis of testimony from a questionable witness. He was  also represented by a lawyer who had never tried a capital case and who refused to be left alone with his client. In 1997, federal courts overturned Williamson's conviction on the basis of ineffectiveness of counsel. DNA tests confirmed that he could not have committed the rape. Williamson lives in a group home in Oklahoma City. He earns extra income playing guitar in coffeehouses.

''I just wanted out of Oklahoma. I was afraid of the people there. They said I raped and murdered Debbie Sue Carter, and I didn't do it. They took me to trial in a town where I had grown up, been an honor student in my school, married my hometown beauty-pageant-contest winner, where I was a second-round draft choice of the Oakland Athletics. As a man who's been charged with a sex slaying, I don't trust anybody. If something happens in my community, I'm getting hold of my lawyer. They'll lie and they'll make up stories about you.

''I don't ever talk about my case with people here. There's some people that  found out inadvertently how I arrived at harbor here, how I arrived from prison. I choose not to talk about it at all. I don't want any unsolved crimes coming my way. . . . I'd rather die than go to jail again; that's how painful jail is. It was like hellfire. I thought it was possible that this may be the eternity that I suffer. I became so depressed that I thought I could end my life. I took a sheet and I stood up on my commode in my cell, on my toilet. I tied the sheet above where the vent was and then I pulled it tight, and then I put the sheet around my neck, and I thought to myself, if I were to jump right now, I would die. I experimented.

''I prayed a lot. That's what got me through. And my music. I learned how to play the blues. I haven't felt like practicing. I haven't felt like doing nothing. Every day there are times when I feel like I'm in prison again.

"I have flashbacks. Sometimes I feel like I'm in prison for hours at a time. I know I'm not, but I can't stop feeling like I'm in prison. I'm not sure I still want to live, but I'm not suicidal.''

Excerpt, New York Times article, December 10, 2000, Sara Rimer writer