BATON ROUGE -- A man held 26 years behind bars for rape has been released after DNA evidence proved he was falsely convicted, adding to the growing list of Louisiana convicts later exonerated by scientific evidence.

Johnson, who's now 52, was convicted of the 1982 rape after the Sabine Parish victim identified him as her attacker. He spent most of those years in the state penitentiary at Angola.

Johnson, of Leesville, was released Monday, after DNA evidence cleared him and implicated another man. He appeared Tuesday at a news conference in Baton Rouge, where he insisted he doesn't hold a grudge after spending so long in prison for a crime committed by someone else.

"It ain't going to do no good, being angry," he said.

Since 1990, 10 men in Louisiana have been exonerated by DNA evidence after committing violent crimes and getting long sentences, according to Emily Maw, head of the Innocence Project New Orleans, a nonprofit whose legal help got Johnson out of prison.

The rape occurred July 12, 1982, in Many, a small, west-central Louisiana town about 170 miles northeast of Houston.

Johnson was arrested and convicted after the victim picked his picture out of a photo lineup. He was sentenced to life imprisonment without the chance of parole.

Nine months after that rape, another occurred in the same apartment complex as the first. A man named John McNeal was convicted of that attack. The DNA test performed on Johnson showed that McNeal committed both rapes, said Vanessa Potkin, Johnson's lawyer.

McNeal remains in prison after his conviction for the second rape.

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On the Net: Innocence Project: http://www.innocenceproject.org/

(Copyright 2008 by The Associated Press. All Rights Reserved.)