“This court finds Elena Cole to be factually innocent of all charges.

She is free to go.” And the gallery, which had held its breath for the length of the reading, erupted.

The word innocent is a strange and heavy thing to say about a person the state was recently prepared to execute, and the judge’s use of it mattered enormously, in a way the cheering gallery may not have fully registered in the moment.

He did not say merely that the conviction was overturned, that a technicality had been found, that the evidence was now insufficient, any of the narrow legal formulas by which the wrongly convicted are sometimes released without ever quite being cleared.