Thanks to an unusually compassionate move by Common Pleas Court Judge Earl Trent and some good, old-fashioned detective work by his defense team, Granger's attorneys were able to prove the thing he had clung to from day one.
His innocence.
No DNA
From day one, the odds were stacked against Granger. Most of the innocent are exonerated on the basis of DNA evidence. There was no DNA in Granger's case.
But that didn't stop investigators from charging him for the robbery and murder outside a neighborhood bar in North Philadelphia.
Never mind that Granger wasn't even there.
The day before the murder in 1980, Granger had been released from prison after serving three years for sexual assault, an offense of which he says he was wrongly accused.
Granger says he was in South Philadelphia on the day of the murder, celebrating his release with his family. And even though no witnesses to the murder positively identified him from a photo lineup, detectives burst into his house in March 1981 and arrested him.
"I fully cooperated, I had nothing to hide," said Granger. But in trying to remember his whereabouts on the night of the murder so many months before, he erred and said he was with his parole officer. "I didn't lie. I just made a mistake."
A judge convicted him, and he was sentenced to life.
It's rare for an attorney to take on the case of a lifer because the chances of winning are so small.
But in 2008, Shakeema Walker-Welsch, 33, Granger's daughter - who happens to be an Olympic-caliber triple jumper - persuaded Karl Schwartz, formerly of the Defenders Association of Philadelphia, to look at her father's case. Schwartz realized the case was fraught with all kinds of problems.
