Scott Hornoff pulled back the curtains and peered out at the thick blanket of white that had fallen overnight and covered the streets and the sidewalks of Warwick, Rhode Island, with nearly two feet of snow. The newspapers were calling it the storm of the century. Talking heads on television were calling it a blizzard of monumental proportions, and on talk radio it was almost a natural disaster.

That amused Hornoff. After all, if anybody understood just how prone the media is to hyperbole, he did. If he hadn't learned it during his years as a Warwick cop, he had certainly learned it in the years that followed.

Officer Scott Hornoff in uniform

To Hornoff, the blizzard of 2003 was a godsend. For six long years he had sat in a Rhode Island prison cell, doing time for a murder he hadn't committed, dreaming of the day when he would be able to return home, stand on his front steps, point his face toward the falling snow and maybe even catch a snowflake on his tongue, the way he used to when he was a kid.

Adult Correctional Institute, R.I. (AP/Wide World)

"I'll tell you what," Hornoff once told a visitor in prison. "If I ever get out of here, I'll shovel the sidewalk with a tablespoon."

Now he was free, released after another man, riddled by guilt and haunted by the thought that Hornoff was wasting away in a tiny cell, removed from his family and his friends and even segregated from the rest of the prison population, finally came forward and confessed to the crime.

"Are you bitter?" he had been asked. He didn't have time for bitterness, he said. He had six years of living to make up for. He had to renew his relationship with his three sons, who were growing up fast. He had made promises in prison -- big promises and small ones -- and he had to keep them.

The snow that had fallen on Warwick the night before gave him the chance to keep one of the small ones. He zipped up his jacket, pulled on his boots, and headed outside with a tablespoon in his hand.

Jeffrey Scott Hornoff -- just plain Scott to his friends -- is one of more than 120 wrongfully convicted inmates who have been freed from prisons in virtually every jurisdiction in the country in recent years. They owe their freedom in large part to attorneys working with the Innocence Project, a band of lawyers inspired by noted defense attorney and DNA expert Barry Scheck who served as a member of the infamous Dream Team representing O.J. Simpson against charges that he murdered his wife, Nicole Brown Simpson, and Ron Goldman.

Barry Scheck (AP/Wide World)

But in many respects, the Hornoff case is an anomaly. In most cases in which a conviction is overturned, skilled defense attorneys reviewing the cases can easily spot the errors that led to the wrong man doing time, says Rob Feldman, a Boston lawyer who works with the New England branch of the Innocence Project. In some cases, overzealous investigators rush to judgment, focusing their probes on one suspect, usually one of the usual suspects in a given community, to the exclusion of all others. As a result, they become blind to evidence that might point to the real culprit, Feldman says. Often, men and women wrongfully accused of a crime are poor and without the financial means to hire a skilled defense attorney. Often, they suffer as a result. Other times, questionable forensic evidence -- "junk science" is the way Feldman describes it -- is used to sway a gullible jury.

But Hornoff's case was different. He wasn't poor. He wasn't a denizen of one of the rougher neighborhoods that authorities often troll looking for suspects to unsolved crimes. "I'm a 40-year-old white guy, a cop," is how Hornoff himself puts it.

He had competent legal representation. The lead attorney in his defense had spent 10 years with the attorney general's office and had served as lead prosecutor in three of Rhode Island's five counties. Nor was there what one might consider a rush to judgment in Hornoff's case, says Feldman. The crime for which he was wrongfully convicted -- the slaying of his former girlfriend, Vicky Cushman, a bright and vivacious young woman with movie-star good looks -- had been under investigation for more than a half decade before Hornoff's arrest, first by the Warwick police department and then by the Rhode Island state police and the state attorney general's office.

There was no junk science in the case, no perjured testimony, no erroneous identification by a less-than-credible witness.

In the Hornoff case the system simply plodded along, grinding to a conclusion. As it turned out, it was the wrong conclusion. And an innocent man spent six and three-quarter years behind bars for a crime that he didn't commit.

Why?

"I don't really have a very good answer for you," Feldman says.

"I'll tell you this, though," says Hornoff, "if this could happen to me, it could happen to anyone."