Freed after serving 22 years behind bars for a rape he did not commit, Wilton Dedge said Thursday he is still getting used to the world outside prison walls.
Dedge, who walked out of Brevard County Jail last August, was cleared of a 1981 rape.
"Everything's changed, from where I grew up, to the price of everything. The way people drive, the overbuilding in Florida ... it's like I'm 20 years old in a 43-year-old body."

Dedge and his attorneys are asking Florida legislators this spring to give him almost $4.9 million in compensation for wrongful imprisonment, lost wages and costs incurred by his family and lawyers.

Insisting throughout the years that he was innocent, Dredge was finally exonerated last year by an analysis of DNA evidence, science unheard of when the Port St. John man was convicted in 1982 and again during a 1984 retrial.

So far, he has received nothing from the state, not even the $100 Florida gives convicts upon their release. Brevard-Seminole State Attorney Norm Wolfinger sent him a letter of apology, and said Thursday he backs some kind of compensation for Dedge.

But recalling the years lost behind bars, the slightly built Dedge is calm and betrays no bitterness.

His parents, who accompanied Dedge to Tallahassee where they hoped to meet with legislative leaders, said they never lost faith in their son. They regularly traveled hundreds of miles across the state to visit him in various prisons as each year drained slowly away.

Dedge was a surfer who partied and drifted from job to job before he was accused of raping and slashing a 17-year-old girl with a box-cutter, beginning a two-decade journey through Florida's tough prison system.

Now, after languishing for years, Dedge suddenly is drawing national attention. His lead attorney is Talbot "Sandy" D'Alemberte, a former president of Florida State University and past head of the American Bar Association.

Dedge also is featured in a documentary about wrongfully convicted Americans, part of the Sundance Film Festival in Utah. Former U.S. Attorney Janet Reno has consulted on the case and Brevard lobbyist Guy Spearman, who represents a roster of major industry clients, is taking up Dedge's cause in the Legislature.

Legislators are considering "more like $1 million to $3 million," as compensation for Dedge, his family and lawyers.

Despite expressions of sympathy from legislators, Dedge faces an uphill fight in the Capitol. In Dedge's case, no lawsuit yet has been filed, but under the state's sovereign immunity law, legal awards against governments are limited to $100,000 per person and $200,000 per claim.

Any amount beyond that must be approved by the Legislature.