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It has been about three months since Terrell Gills’s release from jail, and there are still sleepless nights and days spent in his room as he contemplates the year and a half he spent on Rikers Island for a crime of which he was acquitted.
He stays there for most of the day with the door locked, his jail life so ingrained that he still eats at times close to his old jail schedule: 4:30 a.m., noon and 5 p.m.
There is other baggage: antisocial feelings, and the questions that come during job interviews about the nearly two years left blank on his résumé.
The answers do not come easily.
Mr. Gills, now 36, was arrested in August 2015, accused of robbing a Dunkin’ Donuts about three months earlier in Jamaica, Queens. The arrest was made, in part, on the strength of forensic evidence that is typically persuasive: a DNA match.
Investigators recovered a DNA sample from a touch-screen register that the robber had touched. The sample was checked against a state database, and it matched Mr. Gills’s DNA, entered...