Nearly every day, as he has for six months, Herman Atkins confronts an unbearable moment. A job application faces him down. How to explain why, at 34, he has no work history. The truth, he is certain, could cost him the job. Atkins, an unemployed black man from South Central Los Angeles, has spent nearly the last 13 years victimized by a lie that was not his, nor technically anyone else's. A euphemism, if there were a suitable one, would sound something like "judicial error."
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