Rondell Sanders is a free man after spending twenty years in prison for a murder he always maintained he did not commit. Wednesday morning he was released from prison after being acquitted in his third trial since 1994.
He said he survived because of his Christian faith, which he had from childhood but rediscovered in prison.
“I'll never forget falling on my knees one night in my cell, and I told God, I said this is not where I want to be but if this is what you have for me in life and if you're never going to let me out then give me the grace, the grace to endure it,” Sanders said.
Sanders said his freedom felt amazing. His attorneys (Russell ainsworth & Steve greenberg) credited Sanders’ own legal efforts while in prison for making that freedom happen.
“He gathered all of the evidence and then used it to overturn his conviction. There was no fluke, this is the result of years of dedicated hard work and some expert lawyering that he did by simply reading a few books,” said Sander’s attorney with the Exonoration Project, Russell Ainsworth.
Sanders said after losing his initial trial and several appeals with other lawyers, he knew he needed to take matters into his own hands. Sanders said he spent 10-12 hours a day, seven days a week while incarcerated studying law.
“So, I took about a thousand dollars, asked my sister Virginia to get about one thousand dollars worth of legal books and I taught myself the law, as much as I can and I took on the justice system,” Sanders said
A judge eventually awarded Sanders a new trial based on his claim of ineffective assistance of counsel. Prosecutors appealed, but in 2011 an appeals court upheld the ruling. Last year his first retrial ended with a hung jury, with 11 voting to convict and a lone holdout, Greenberg said.
“That’s what makes this so scary,” Greenberg said. “But for that one juror a year ago, he’d have been wrongfully convicted twice.”
that one juror..bet it was a black person too 
Well done Mr. Sanders, well done 
