Released from death row, but not exonerated

[wheezer]

Paul Gregory House has known many prisons.

Death row. His own body ravaged by multiple sclerosis. A long, legal limbo that traps him between judges who've said he may be innocent — and state prosecutors who've refused to give up.

On July 2, unable to walk or feed himself, he was wheeled out of a hospital prison in Nashville, turned over to his mother, fitted with an electronic tracking bracelet, and placed under house arrest. His new trial for first-degree murder is scheduled to begin Oct. 14.

This time, Union County District Attorney General Paul Phillips won't seek the death penalty. But he still thinks House should be incarcerated for the rest of his life.

For 22 years, House has been blamed for raping and killing a neighbor in the clannish, dirt-poor hills of eastern Tennessee's Union County, a place where even in the 1980s, some houses still lacked indoor plumbing.

He was sentenced to death in 1986. Since then, his appeals have bumped up and down a long legal staircase, ultimately reaching the U.S. Supreme Court, which questioned his guilt in a landmark 2006 ruling and ordered a new trial.

No "reasonable juror," the high court said, would have convicted House after seeing DNA results, a testing technology not available at the time of his trial. Nor, the justices noted, would jurors have been convinced beyond a reasonable doubt if they'd heard witnesses — who didn't come forward until years later — describe the victim's husband as drunken abuser who confessed to killing her.

A federal judge ordered House released pending a new trial. But he stayed locked up for two more years while state prosecutors filed procedural challenges.

He remains accused.

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