Clarence Moses-EL has been in prison for rape and assault since he was 32 years old. He’s 60 now. But there’s a good chance he could be freed soon. A Denver district judge has ordered his convictions lifted and a new trial held since another man confessed to the charges that brought Moses-EL a 48-year sentence in 1987. Judge Kandace Gerdes said he likely will be acquitted as a consequence of the confession, which was first made in a letter to Moses-EL in 2013 and confirmed by the assailant, L.C. Jackson, in testimony this past July.

The conviction was underpinned by one piece of evidence: testimony of the victim that Moses-EL’s identity came to her in a dream. As is too often the sad truth in such cases, the Denver district attorney has for years maintained that the conviction was legitimate despite growing evidence to the contrary capped off by the recent confession. Susan Greene at the Colorado Independent reports:

Denver officials’ missteps include: Destroying all DNA evidence. After a judge granted Moses-EL an order to test the rape kit, the victim’s clothes and other key evidence for genetic fingerprinting, authorities in 1995 put the evidence in a box marked “DO NOT DESTROY.” Then, they threw it in a dumpster. Destroying the evidence prevented Moses-EL from proving his innocence for more than two decades.

Refusing to re-open the case in 2006, when Morrissey’s office started prosecuting L.C. Jackson for a similar rape of a mother and her daughter. Jackson was the first man the victim in the Moses-EL case named in her outcry, but police and prosecutors never investigated him. Even though Morrissey knew of Jackson’s criminal past, the DA asserted—incorrectly—that Jackson was never named by the victim in Moses-EL’s case.

Ignoring a statement by the lead police investigator that he always had doubts about the case

Trying to suppress new blood evidence showing it’s highly likely that someone with L.C. Jackson’s blood type was the attacker, and highly unlikely that it was someone with Moses-EL’s blood type.

Twenty years ago, Moses-EL had contacted Barry Scheck of the Innocence Project seeking help in getting the conviction overturned. He was told he needed to raise $1,000 for a DNA test. He came up with the money, mostly with bits of cash from fellow inmates. His attorneys then gained him a court order mandating reexamination of several pieces of evidence, including DNA. But the district attorney’s office failed to pass the order along to the police, and the DNA, held in a box labeled DO NOT DESTROY, was chucked out.

The current district attorney, Mitch Morrissey, has long sought to stop Jackson from testifying. Among other things, Jackson claimed the district attorney tried to intimidate him into recanting. Now that’s he lost all his efforts to keep the case from being retried, Morrissey might choose not to re-prosecute because of the new evidence. If he does re-prosecute, he’ll have a hard time persuading a jury that Moses-EL was the rapist given Jackson’s confession and the blood evidence.

Moses-EL has good reason to hope he will finally get to see his grandchildren as a free man.