SANTA CLARA — A team with the Northern California Innocence Project based at Santa Clara University ended 12 years of dogged legal wrangling last week when their client was cleared of molestation charges that put him in prison and made him register as a sex offender.

Ed Easley, a 62-year-old electrician, was accused and convicted of molesting a 7-year-old in Shasta County 24 years ago. Since then, it came to light that he had been scapegoated because the young victim was protecting a juvenile male cousin at the behest of family members.

Easley served eight years in prison and spent five years on parole, and after his release the victim came clean as a remorseful adult who contacted the Innocence Project.

But when Easley sought to reverse the wrongful conviction with the NCIP’s help, he found that since he was no longer in custody the court thought he did not have a case, said Linda Starr, director of the NCIP.

“Someone had to be behind bars, on probation or on parole,” Starr said. “Otherwise all they could do was ask the governor to grant them clemency.”

Repeated appeals — four of them, all the way up to the California Supreme Court — were denied. But in one case when he was granted a new hearing, the judge who turned him down wrote that the new evidence including the victim’s recantation would have likely not resulted in a conviction.

But that wasn’t what the judge had to decide, said Starr — in what she described as the toughest standard in the nation, the new evidence had to point “unerringly to innocence and completely undermine the prosecution’s case.”

However, two laws that took effect in January related directly to the issues in Easley’s case. One enables people released from custody to prove their innocence. The other changed the standards for the introduction of new evidence to prove innocence, switching from the need for it to “point unerringly to innocence” to merely show that it “more likely than not” would have made a difference in the original trial.

“The new standard is a game-changer,” said Starr.

Starr and co-counsel Paige Kaneb persuaded a judge that the new law applied to Easley and that the previous judge’s declaration surpassed the “more likely than not” standard.

The charges were dropped and the conviction vacated.

“He can stop registering wrongly as a sex offender,” reads the release. “He can find a home, take those electrical jobs and most importantly, he can truly start to recover.”

Kaneb said “it took 24 years, but the truth finally came out.”

“At least two people were overcome with relief by the news,” she said. “Ed Easley, whose name will now be cleared, and the victim herself, whose conscience can now be cleared. Sometimes justice delayed is not, fortunately, justice denied.”