The Brooklyn man freed last month after spending 22 years behind bars for a crime he didn’t commit is now embroiled in another Kafkaesque nightmare – this time with the Department of Motor Vehicles.
Scott Fappiano says the state agency won’t let him apply for a driver’s license because he doesn’t have the proper ID, namely prison-release papers.
Because he was exonerated, he was never issued such papers.
Two weeks ago, Fappiano, 44, brought his Social Security card, a newly issued credit card and his inmate ID, which features his photo, to the Coney Island DMV.
Those documents, he believed, should have fulfilled the five proof-of-name points required to apply for a New York license.
A DMV staffer, however, told him the inmate ID counts for nothing if not accompanied by release papers, he said.
When Fappiano explained that exonerated citizens are not issued such papers, the staffer said there was nothing she could do. Ditto her supervisor.
“Twenty-two years ago, the state took my identity. Now they don’t want to give it back,” he told The Post. The wrongly convicted man, who has never had a passport and whose 1979-issued driver’s license expired long ago, is trying desperately to obtain acceptable photo ID. But both he and his attorney are at a loss for how to do so.
Fappiano was released Oct. 6 after DNA evidence taken from a 23-year-old pair of sweatpants cleared him of charges he raped a cop’s wife in 1983.
Since then, he has been living with his mother in Bensonhurst. He hopes to get a union job soon, though only long enough to have some much-needed dental work covered by its health plan.
Longer term, he wants an office job.
“In prison, I was head clerk in the grievance department and better at the job than anyone,” he said. “I’d love to use my negotiating skills in the real world.”