For those falsely charged and imprisoned for long terms, freedom is, at best, complicated -- harder than anything they imagined in the years behind bars, and different in a thousand ways, most of them disturbing.

None of this can they know, of course, at the beginning -- the day of release, with rejoicing family and friends and the clamor of reporters inevitably on hand for these occasions. It takes a bit of time, after the joy and celebrations, the gratitude for exoneration, to grasp the realities of the life to come. True, it took hardly any time for the nearly 70-year-old Violet Amirault to size up the chaos confronting her, when she was freed, penniless -- no more than two days before, she began to murmur that, in prison, she at least knew where she was and what was going to happen the next hour. The feeling did not last long, but neither did her life in freedom, such as it was.

At his homecoming party the day of his release, former Miami police officer Grant Snowden suddenly stopped at the fence of the house while everyone else in the group walked through. He laughed, recognizing the reflex -- a former prisoner who did not yet walk easily through barricades. Nor would much else come easily, not sleep, relationships, finding a job, or any other aspect of life other, perhaps, than his long morning runs. Freedom had come after he had given up all but the frailest hope. Sentenced to a remarkable five life terms, he had served 12 years, and seen all his state appeals denied when, in March 1998, a federal appeals court threw out his conviction.

At the party following his release, reporters and family members crowded into his mother's small house and the guest of honor looked a happy man, confident of the future ahead.

It did not take long for the realities of that future to sink in, prime among them his trouble finding a job. Because of practices peculiar to Florida's record system, every job he sought brought a computer check that showed convictions on charges of child sex abuse, notwithstanding the court's reversal. His failure to find work made him ever more despondent, struggle though he would against the feelings, which he tried to conceal from family members, his mother in particular. He was, after all, supposed to be grateful for his deliverance, exonerated, free, and about to begin to live again -- except that he felt neither free nor that he was doing much living.

He felt, instead, tense most of the time, along with the beginning of a growing anger. As he had before, endlessly, he thought about 1984 and the baseless charges that had blown his life apart. The difference now was that he was a free man and had begun to think like one -- to consider all that had happened and to ask why no one would be held responsible.

In February, his life took a distinctly happier turn, when he married a spirited and attractive high school government teacher. He considers himself the most fortunate of men to have found her, Grant reports. In addition to all else she brought to the marriage, she had a friendly former husband who also happened to be an attorney. When a letter arrived from the Florida Department of Law Enforcement which announced that Grant Snowden was listed as a sexual predator, that he had to register as one and have his picture distributed in his neighborhood, Mrs. Snowden's former husband undertook to straighten the department out, in no uncertain terms. Grant soon received a letter acknowledging the error.

Having joined the fray, the sympathetic attorney is now trying to correct the file on Grant Snowden so that erroneous reports no longer pop up on the computer. He has much to be thankful for, he is the first to say -- friendship, support, his wife and a job moderately more satisfying than any he has found up to now. All that he lacks is a way to blot out the past.

The realities of their new-found freedom came early to Carol and Mark Doggett, among the numerous citizens of Wenatchee, Wash., falsely accused of child sex abuse in the mid-'90s. New York appellate attorney Robert Rosenthal, who had succeeded in winning Grant Snowden's reversal, also undertook the Doggetts' appeal, won in 1997. Afterward, he told the couple, who had served three years of a 10 years-10 months sentence, that they had about 90 days to enjoy their period of gratitude and exhilaration. After that the rough times would likely begin.

A little more than a month after their liberation, Mrs. Doggett called the attorney to say she and her husband were ahead of schedule. The hard times had already arrived with their efforts to get the state to return their children, sent to foster care when Mark and Carol were accused of assaulting them sexually. Among other allegations, the Doggetts were supposed to have forced their five children to line up outside a bedroom door, nightly, to await their turn to be raped by their parents.

That was in 1995. The courts have since then thrown out one conviction after another in Wenatchee cases, and a few weeks ago -- to avoid the prospect of another reversal -- prosecutors set free the last of the 21 people sent to prison in the now infamous sex ring case. The news made 42-year-old Carol Doggett want to jump up and down and shout aloud for happiness, she reports. The normally self-contained Mrs. Doggett could do nothing of the kind since she was, as it happened, at her office job at the time, but it is possible to hear in her voice the power of that impulse.

Neither she nor her husband have had many occasions for great joy since their release though there have been a few -- not least when the day came that saw every one of their children finally returned.

The last child to come home was the youngest, nine years old at the time her parents were tried, and now in her teens. Before she could return, a court-appointed psychologist had to examine the girl, her parents, look into the family history and at general conditions at home. After concluding her inquiry, the psychologist delivered her report, in which she concluded that Carol and Mark Doggett had never molested their children, but the youngest girl had indeed been injured. She had been traumatized, the report said, by the separation from her parents.

The couple had emerged from prison without funds, or credit. Carol, who had graduated from college with a degree in business, found work in a grocery store and then, with the help of a friend, found her current job working with computers. She and Mark were fortunate in their friends, she says, and were luckier than most people in their position.

"We survived, we have our children."

Survival meant, among other things, learning to deal with the the nightmares that came regularly, and with certain recollections of life in prison. When the couple moved to a different community, she began to cry on entering the church. She could not say exactly why. She sensed it had to do with the degradation of life behind bars. No other woman in that church had ever been strip searched as she had -- a regular event in prison, memories of which filled her with rage and humiliation.

She does not appear a woman easy to humiliate. Nor was she, in prison, when other women cursed her as a child abuser. Only one thing terrified her in prison, as it did Mark, and that was the fear that the children would not survive.

Her husband drives a forklift to make money now, a job that gives him altogether too much time to think about things. A tall man with an easy manner, he is concerned mainly with one thing -- justice -- an idea seldom far from his thoughts. Or Grant Snowden's either.

"All the people responsible -- the prosecutors, the investigators -- they're untouched." For them -- after all the proof of the trumped-up prosecutions, people thrown into prison, the children ruined -- there are, Mark Doggett observes, no consequences.

It is a common enough response, among those in his situation. Like many accused citizens, he had had faith in the legal system, and in the protections guaranteed by the Constitution. So, too, had Grant Snowden and the Amiraults, owners of the Fells Acres Day School. They believed that democracy and fairness and the American system would see them through -- would assure that a jury could not possibly believe lies and wild stories, of the kind offered as evidence against them.

When they were convicted and sentenced, they knew that innocent citizens could be found guilty of horrible crimes they never dreamed of, that they could be separated from society and sent away -- in the case of those falsely accused of child molestation, to multiple life terms.

Even so, an ingrained belief in justice is not easily abandoned. When they emerged from prison, it was justice they sought, even as they understood that they would find none. They understood, and it haunted them, that there there would be no consequences to the prosecutors and the investigators, and still they thought of justice.

Cheryl Amirault has her mind on other matters. There is as yet no news from the Massachusetts governor's Board of Pardons, whose months-long pondering of the question of a pardon for Gerald Amirault -- an epic frozen in time -- has brought no decision.

For Cheryl, the days have only one focus. The mornings are not wonderful, the nights worse, nothing is quite right till she arrives at her job. Work has been her curative since the Amiraults were first charged in the early '80s. In 1983, when authorities closed the Fells Acres Day School, with her picture in the papers daily, she threw herself into her job at United Parcel Service, where she worked up until the day she and Violet stood trial.

Today she works with customers at John Hancock Financial Services. She arrived as an office temporary and was soon hired full time, all the while wondering whether her bosses and co-workers knew anything about her.

More to the point, she had some concern about what they would say if they did -- which she found out, soon enough, when she had been employed at the company six months. In late 1998, the day after a detailed media story on the case, she was called to the office of two company directors -- a summons she answered trembling with apprehension.

Their message was brief. They wanted to tell her, the directors told her, that they were proud to have her as an employee, and that they wanted her to know that.

Back at her desk, she found a flood of supportive e-mails from workers, another measure, she thought -- before tears overcame her -- of the credibility people now ascribed to the charges that the Amiraults were child-molesters. Every time something happens in the case, the e-mails pour in, the directors call, to ask how things are.

It would be nice, she observes, if the rest of life, or for that matter, the nights in her own bed, could be as soothing and free of anxiety as a busy day at the office. Every day she felt compelled to fight the case. While Gerald is still in prison there is no rest. Every day -- because prosecutors placed her on 10 years' probation in the deal in which they allowed her to remain free -- she must call the probation officer. Once a week, without fail, she has to submit to a urine test for drugs, though drug problems are no part of her record.

On a recent morning, she awoke feeling strangely rested, and realized that she had had, for the first time she could remember, no nightmares -- a regular event she took for granted. The dreams are almost always the same. She and her mother and brother are all back, running the Fells Acres Day School, which they love, and where they are happy, with the children all about. Yet she is terrified, as she runs to the windows, fearing that the police will come, as they always do.