Diary note frees man serving rape sentence

The Associated Press

AKRON, Ohio - Words in a diary have freed a man from prison five years after a jury convicted him of rape.

"I'm happy to be out. It's been five long years," Nathaniel M. Lewis, a former University of Akron football player, said Tuesday. "It's hard to be in the joint for something you didn't do."

Prosecutors dismissed their case Tuesday, but the real turning point for Lewis came two weeks ago when a federal appeals court said he was denied a fair trial in 1997.

The 6th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Cincinnati ruled that a judge should have allowed the jury in the Lewis trial to see writings in his accuser's journal that hinted that the sex was consensual and she had a motive to charge him with rape.

In her diary, his accuser wrote she was sick of her sexual encounters with men but that she was "just not strong enough to say no to them."

"This is where it ends," she wrote, an apparent reference to her charges against Lewis.

The judge excluded the passage because of a state law that prohibits defense attorneys from using an accuser's sexual history to discredit a rape charge.

The Ohio Attorney General's office has decided not to seek an appeal, spokesman Joe Case said Wednesday.