Emmanuel Kelly Cooper was resurrected last year. After spending 27 years behind bars for a murder he says he did not commit, Cooper was released in January 2020, just before the coronavirus began wreaking havoc across America. The pandemic has not been easy for the world, but he remains unfazed. “I’ve been incarcerated a long time. This is nothing,” the soft-spoken Cooper said in a video interview from his home in Raleigh, North Carolina, which he shares with his wife, Sandy, and their 10-year-old daughter, Layla. “My freedom supersedes my worries about what’s going on.” He spends his days cooking, which he did in prison — “Besides God, that was one of the therapeutic things that kept me strong” — and other stay-at-home-dad tasks like helping Layla with her schoolwork.