The conviction and life prison sentence of a man for the vicious murder of an elderly woman in her Minneapolis apartment nearly three decades ago was a failure of justice, according to the Hennepin County Attorney’s Office and the Great North Innocence Project.
In a shocking turn of events, the state’s key witness in the 1998 trial that convicted Bryan Hooper, then 27, of first-degree murder has confessed to not only lying on the witness stand but carrying out the murder herself. The confession led the County Attorney’s Office and Great North Innocence Project to file a joint petition to vacate Hooper’s conviction for murdering 77-year-old Ann Prazniak…