PHILADELPHIA — Twenty-eight years after police arrested Chester Hollman for murder, 25 years after a judge sentenced him to life in prison, and seven years after a key trial witness admitted she had falsely implicated him because of pressure from investigators, a judge on Monday accepted prosecutors’ acknowledgment that Hollman was “likely innocent” and ordered him freed from prison.

The ruling by Philadelphia Common Pleas Court Judge Gwendolyn N. Bright came after prosecutors and Hollman’s defense lawyer jointly petitioned the judge to throw out his conviction in a 1991 killing near Rittenhouse Square. In court filings, the District Attorney’s Office conceded that prosecutors and police from that time had hidden evidence that pointed to more viable suspects.

Hollman was a 20-year-old armored-car driver with no criminal record when he was arrested. He’s now 48. He wasn’t in court Monday to hear the news, or connected through video conferencing. But under Bright’s order, he could be released from a state prison in Luzerne County as early as Tuesday, with all charges expected to be formally dismissed later this month.

“This is a glorious day,” Alan Tauber, Hollman’s longtime lawyer, said outside the courthouse, after calling Hollman’s sister Deanna to tell her of the victory. She broke into tears of joy.

“We have a flawed system and innocent people do go to jail,” Tauber said. “But we have a great system, because there is a means for correcting that.”

Hollman’s case has attracted renewed attention since an April 2017 report in the The Inquirer highlighted the pervasive practice of lying in the criminal justice system and raised questions about his prosecution. It also became the focus of a podcast, Undisclosed, that raised more questions about whether Hollman is innocent. Tauber said both accounts “lent a lot of credibility at a key time.”

Hollman’s is the eighth murder conviction that the Conviction Integrity Unit of the Philadelphia District Attorney’s Office has helped to reverse since Larry Krasner became the district attorney in January 2018, according to Assistant District Attorney Patricia Cummings, supervisor of the unit.

Cummings blamed the office and the Philadelphia Police Department for suppressing evidence that pointed to other suspects in the August 20, 1991 shooting of University of Pennsylvania student Tae-Jung Ho.

Had investigators pursued those other suspects, Cummings wrote last month in a filing to the judge, they “may have been able to successfully prosecute them and avoid the wrongful conviction of Hollman.”

Bright’s ruling was a stunning reversal of her conclusion in 2012 that Hollman did not deserve a new trial even after the key prosecution witness, Deirdre Jones, testified then that she had lied to jurors in 1993. She told them she had been riding in an SUV with Hollman and two others when she watched two of them get out and heard a gunshot.

Jones, who was then a neighbor of Hollman’s, has since said that police had pressured her to incriminate Hollman. David Baker, the now-retired detective who took Jones’ original statement, denied in the 2012 hearing and in an 2017 interview with The Inquirer that he had coerced her.

Jones has since said her conscience had bothered her for years, and that’s why she eventually agreed to tell a judge that her original testimony against Hollman was a lie.

Tauber was not Hollman’s trial lawyer. But he has been working for years behind the scenes —and in court appeals — to win Hollman’s release.

Krasner’s 2017 election brought not only a former defense attorney to the city’s top prosecutor job, but one who pledged to impose a new level of scrutiny on what he contends have been decades of injustices by Philadelphia law enforcement. Under Krasner, the Conviction Integrity Unit re-investigated the case at Tauber’s request.

Hollman’s prosecution in the 1990s, led at the time by renowned Assistant District Attorney Roger King, had included several unsettling issues: It was built largely on testimony of Jones and another witness from the scene — a man who years after the trial would also recant his original testimony and say police pressured him to lie. Police also found no gun or physical evidence that linked Hollman to the crime. Hollman didn’t testify — on the advice of his trial lawyer — but has always maintained his innocence.

His arrest had followed the report of a cabdriver who heard the gunshots erupt at 22nd Street between Walnut and Chestnut Streets that August 1991 morning then trailed the killers in a white SUV and got the first three letters of its license plate: YZA. Police pulled over Hollman and Jones a few blocks away in a white Chevrolet Blazer with a license plate starting with YZA.

Whether that really could be a mere coincidence has always been a troubling question in the case, but the Conviction Integrity Unit concluded that there were other viable suspects — and that at least one tip that came into police 21 hours after the murder should have been turned over to the defense.

That tipster said a man and a woman involved in the shooting were at a Strawberry Mansion home. One of the residents was a woman named Denise Combs, who, it turned out, at the time of the murder had also rented a white SUV with a plate starting with YZA from the same rental agency that loaned out the vehicle Hollman was driving. Combs returned her SUV shortly after the shooting.

In her interview with investigators, Combs denied any role in the killing. (The Inquirer has been unable to reach her for comment.)