If you stop by the North Star Music Cafe at 225 Congress St. on Friday evening, you'll notice that the renowned photographer Donald Verger has opened a show there and is donating 100 percent of the proceeds to the New York City-based Innocence Project.

He's doing it not just because he supports the Innocence Project's quest to free people who are stuck in jail, accused or convicted of crimes they did not commit, but also because only weeks ago, right here in Portland, he was one of them.

"I'd like what happened to me to be an opportunity for something good," Verger said Wednesday.

First, what happened.

On the afternoon of Dec. 31, according to Portland police Capt. Vern Malloch, a stylist at Studio One, a hair salon on Middle Street, called 911.

She told police that a man had just come into the salon and asked for an unscheduled haircut. She already had a customer and told him she couldn't squeeze him in.

The stylist thought the man had left at that point – until she heard the sound of jangling change out by the cash register. Running out to the front of the salon, she saw the man trying to make off with the cash register.

She confronted him. They struggled. She fell to the floor. The man fled empty-handed.

When police arrived, the victim described her assailant as a clean-shaven white man in his 60s, about 5 feet 9 inches tall, 180 pounds, wearing khaki pants and a blue waist-length jacket.

Verger, 61, who moved to Portland three years ago from Casco, generally matches that physical description. On that day, he also happened to be wearing khakis and a dark waist-length jacket.

And alas, after spending the morning out on Peaks Island photographing the back shore in a snowstorm, he was meandering through the shops in the Old Port that afternoon when two police officers approached him on Exchange Street.

While the officers spoke with Verger (he was not yet handcuffed), another officer performed a "show up" with the victim – a common strategy whereby the victim eyeballs the person being detained and tells police whether he's the guy.

After a couple of passes, Malloch said, the woman said, "That's the man who robbed me."

Verger, whose donated photography graces places such as Maine Medical Center and Mercy Hospital's new Fore River facility, had never been accused of a crime, let alone convicted of one.

And since he's always taking pictures, the time stamps on the photos in his digital camera would show that he was shooting a Boston Red Sox bumper sticker on Exchange Street while the attempted robbery unfolded two blocks away.

Nevertheless, based on the victim's identification, police handcuffed Verger, told him he was being charged with robbery (a Class B felony) and loaded him – gently, he notes – into the back of a cruiser.

"I asked them where they were taking me," Verger said. "And to my astonishment, they told me I was being taken to jail."

And there he stayed that night, all of New Year's Day and part of the next day, before frantic relatives and friends were able to get to a bank and then post his $10,000 cash bail. (He had trouble at first even reaching them on their cell phones, which don't accept collect calls.)

Like the police, Verger said, the guards at the Cumberland County Jail treated him with "kindness and respect" the entire time he was behind bars. Still, he has trouble talking in detail about how it felt to go, in the blink of an eye, from law-abiding citizen to accused felon.

"It's very, very frightening to be accused, to be jailed and in fact to have a charge against you," Verger said.

It's also humiliating. A brief story on the arrest, including Verger's name, appeared in this newspaper on Jan. 3. It seemed, Verger said, as if the entire world read it.

'THEY GOT THE WRONG GUY'

Upon his release, Verger made a...