A Chicago man sentenced to life in prison for a double-murder conviction will be freed this Wednesday. The conviction, 24 years ago, was based on faulty expert testimony and a “confession” that the defendant, Adam Grey – then a juvenile – argued was coerced.

Here is how Adam described the confession:

“…after six hours of interviews, Detective Crescenzo came in and spoke to him alone. “He said, ‘Look, man, I believe you, I believe that you didn’t have anything to do with it. The only way you’re going to get out of it is if you basically say that you did it,’” Gray said. “So I said, ‘OK, I did it.’”

As for the arson evidence, the Appellate Court of Illinois granted a joint motion to drop the indictment against Gray on the basis that:

“Following a thorough, independent investigation, the Cook County State’s Attorney has concluded that Mr. Gray’s 1996 convictions were based on flawed trial testimony from purported experts in the field of fire investigation and are no longer valid,”

“Scientific advances since the time of trial have proven that the fire investigators’ testimonies — while based on beliefs that were widely held in 1996 — were erroneous under current scientific knowledge,”