Walter Forbes had enrolled in drafting technology classes at the community college in Jackson, Mich., in hopes of jump-starting a career in real estate development. That plan ended when he was arrested, at age 25, in connection with an arson death.

In 2017, a witness admitted that she had lied on the stand after being threatened. After a judge vacated the sentence in November, a prosecutor decided last week not to pursue a new trial, freeing Mr. Forbes, now 63, after 38 years behind bars.

Black people represent nearly half of the more than 2,700 people who have been exonerated since 1989, according to the National Registry of Exonerations. For his part, Mr. Forbes, who is Black, maintains that he bears the witness no ill will — something she came to believe only after years of convincing.

Mr. Forbes, whose release was reported by The Detroit Free Press, is reconnecting with the world he left as a young man, one that has grown stranger. Computers can fit in his hand. Thoughts can be broadcast to the world on a whim in 280-character bursts. It can feel overwhelming at times.

The coronavirus pandemic isn’t making things easier. After nearly four decades in a prison cell, he spent his first night of freedom quarantined in a hotel room.

In prison, Mr. Forbes often found himself thinking about a different life for himself, one in which he wasn’t in that bar, on that night, when a chain of events were set off that led to his wrongful imprisonment. “I would think about people who I went to school with,” Mr. Forbes said this week in an interview from his niece’s home. “Some of them are retired now.”

The ordeal began in 1982, when, according to Mr. Forbes, he stepped in to stop a fight involving a Jackson man named Dennis Hall. Mr. Hall shot Mr. Forbes the next day in a parking lot. When Mr. Hall died a month later in a fire that the authorities believed was arson, suspicion quickly fell on Mr. Forbes.

Investigators initially received a tip that the building’s owner had paid someone to start the fire as part of an insurance-fraud scheme. But then a witness came forward. Annice Kennebrew, a 19-year-old mother of two, told the police that Mr. Forbes was one of three men she saw set fire to Mr. Hall’s apartment building in Jackson.

Charges were dropped against one of the men after he passed a polygraph test, according to Imran J. Syed, a director of the Michigan Innocence Clinic and a lawyer for Mr. Forbes. Another was acquitted. Mr. Forbes was sentenced to life without parole.

In prison, Mr. Forbes meticulously researched his case, filed open-records requests, and continued to proclaim his innocence. He sought help from the clinic, a learning lab for students at the University of Michigan Law School that aims to help free the wrongfully convicted. In 2011, Mr. Forbes’s case was handed to Mr. Syed, then a recent graduate.

“It took us 10 years to get to this point,” Mr. Syed said on Tuesday. “Despite how long it took, it’s a straightforward case. And that’s the tragedy of it, really: that it takes 38 years to set right something that’s not terribly complicated.”

“We often encounter cases that involve really complex medical or forensic evidence, or really voluminous records that have been litigated 35 times,” he continued. “This case wasn’t that.”

The clinic began investigating the insurance-fraud tip. Court documents revealed that the owner of the building that was set on fire, David Jones — the subject of the initial tip to the police — was convicted years later in connection with a similar insurance scheme involving arson in which a man also died, in nearby Livingston County. Mr. Jones is believed to be deceased, Mr. Syed said.

After years of outreach efforts by the clinic’s law students to develop a relationship with Ms. Kennebrew, she admitted in a 2017 affidavit that her testimony against Mr. Forbes and the two other men was “a complete fabrication.”

She said two men in the neighborhood threatened to kill her, her children and other family members if she didn’t tell the police the story that they had scripted for her.

Mr. Syed said he believed the statute of limitations on a perjury charge in Michigan had expired. Moreover, he doesn’t think such a charge would be beneficial in a case like this.

“She didn’t do this for monetary gain, or some nefarious purpose,” Mr. Syed said. “She did it because she was scared. We know that people lie under oath. We know that people falsely implicate people. We want those things coming out and not staying hidden forever. We wish she would have done it earlier, but she came forward and did the right thing.”

It’s a sentiment echoed by Mr. Forbes and his family. Angelique Betts, a niece with whom Mr. Forbes has been staying, said that as a young mother and a survivor of violence, she understood the dilemma that Ms. Kennebrew faced.

“She was a teenager, just a baby herself,” Ms. Betts said. “They picked her out, and chose her, and said, ‘If you don’t do this, then we’re going to do X, Y and Z to your kids.’”

“She’s a victim herself and she paid a high price as well for this situation,” she added, “and I hold absolutely no ill will toward her.”

She’s less forgiving of the criminal-justice system. “It’s been a robbery of huge proportions,” said Ms. Betts, who is earning her bachelor’s degree in criminal justice, largely because of her uncle’s experience with the system. “I can only compare it to chattel slavery. It’s been a theft. Walter’s son lost a father. We lost an uncle. Our family was without the patriarchal figure that we needed.”

Mr. Forbes was also angry at the system, at first. Then the anger dissolved, he said, and he started focusing on making his case for freedom.

“Anger would have affected me more than anyone else,” he said. “Being angry with everyone that had a hand in this wouldn’t allow me to see with clarity what had to be done.”

Although Mr. Forbes will never be able to pursue the dream he had as a young community college student, he hopes to achieve a version of it. Mr. Forbes wants to start a business, maybe related to construction or property management. He also said he wanted to use his knowledge of the system to help reform criminal justice.

Mr. Forbes’s lengthy incarceration isn’t the longest on record in the National Registry of Exonerations. Richard Phillips, who was found guilty of murder in Detroit in 1972, had his conviction vacated after serving 45 years. After dismissing the charges in March 2018, Kym L. Worthy, the Wayne County prosecutor who recently created a conviction integrity unit, said the case against Mr. Phillips was “based primarily on the false testimony of the main witness in the case.”

“The system failed him,” she said.

Mr. Syed said that Mr. Forbes expected to receive nearly $2 million for his incarceration. In Michigan, people who were wrongfully imprisoned are entitled to $50,000 for each year of their imprisonment, but it could take several months before he receives it.

Until then he’s living with family in the Detroit area, but he hopes to move into his own place soon. He’s eyeing a fixer-upper in the Lansing area, a farmhouse near the Grand River, where he hopes to raise chickens and go fishing.

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