MINNEAPOLIS – Philip Vance has been waiting four years for the state to decide whether his murder conviction should be overturned.
The 45-year-old is serving a life sentence for the killing of a South St. Paul grocery clerk in 2002. Vance maintains he’s innocent. He points to the lack of physical evidence in the case and the fact that some witnesses who said they heard him confess have since recanted, saying the police pressured them to lie.
Vance exhausted his appeals in 2006, when the Minnesota Supreme Court upheld his conviction. But as the years passed, more people who testified against him started changing their stories…