Exonerated Convict Is Back in Jail : Crime: Benny Powell, one of two men wrongly held for 17 years, is accused of raping a woman in Riverside County.

Benny Powell, the celebrated ex-convict who went from prison to prosperity after being cleared in the 1973 murder of a Los Angeles County sheriff’s deputy, was back behind bars Monday after authorities in Arizona arrested him on charges of rape and sexual assault.

Powell, who less than six months ago was awarded a record $3.5-million settlement from the city of Los Angeles for his 17 years of wrongful imprisonment, had been the subject of a two-month investigation stemming from an alleged attack on a woman in rural Riverside County.

The woman, a UCLA student, has alleged that Powell attacked her May 31 in the town of Beaumont, near Palm Springs. UCLA campus police, to whom the woman made her complaint the day after the alleged assault, would not elaborate except to say that she was acquainted with Powell and was battered as well as raped.

Warrants for his arrest, issued June 30, listed 21 felony counts of rape, forced oral copulation, sodomy and forcible penetration with a foreign object. Police said Powell was arrested outside a bank in the posh Phoenix suburb of Scottsdale, where he recently bought a two-story home with a pool.

Powell’s lawyer could not be reached for comment Monday, but he has said in previous interviews that Powell has “categorically denied any wrongdoing in the case,” noting that he has been wrongfully accused before.

The arrest came less than a year and a half after Powell’s release from prison, where he and his friend, Clarence Chance, had served more than 17 years for the murder of Deputy David Andrews in a gas station in South Los Angeles.

Insisting that they were innocent, the two men eventually captured the attention of a New Jersey minister and private investigator, Jim McCloskey, whose specialty is representing wrongfully convicted inmates.

Under questioning from McCloskey, several witnesses admitted having given false testimony against the two men out of fear of reprisals from police. McCloskey also persuaded the district attorney’s office that physical evidence failed to link the two men to the crime.

At the behest of the district attorney’s office and criminal lawyers who represented them for free, the two men were released, and a year later, awarded $3.5 million apiece.

Deluged with movie offers, real estate deals and requests for handouts, they went their separate ways--Chance to the waiting arms of his large family in Los Angeles, Powell back to Phoenix, where he grew up.