Man Released After Being Held 6 Years in Repressed Memory Case

George Franklin was freed Wednesday, six years after he was imprisoned on the testimony of his daughter, who said she suddenly remembered seeing him kill a childhood friend but whose credibility was later undermined.

Franklin, 57, beamed as he was ordered released during a brief hearing in San Mateo County Superior Court after prosecutors asked that charges against him in the 1969 murder be dismissed.

Plans to retry Franklin after his conviction was overturned last year were scuttled when DNA results eliminated Franklin as a suspect in a second murder that Eileen Franklin said she remembered seeing her father commit. And a sister said Eileen had undergone hypnosis--which would have made her testimony unusable.

“This has been a Kafkaesque ordeal for him, and now the Kafkaesque ordeal is over,” Douglas Horngrad, one of Franklin’s defense lawyers, said after the hearing.

Franklin, who had denied the murder charge, was released about five hours later. As he left the jail, he held up a copy of the San Mateo County Times, which had a headline reading “Franklin Walks.” He left in a waiting car.