Overview
- Hennepin County Attorney Mary Moriarty and the Great North Innocence Project filed a joint petition on August 12 asking a court to vacate Brian Hooper Sr.’s first-degree murder conviction from 1998.
- Prosecutors report that Chalaka Lewis, the state’s primary trial witness, recanted her testimony on July 29 and provided recorded interviews in which she confessed to killing 77-year-old Ann Prazniak.
- Case records show Lewis’s fingerprint on the packing tape used to suffocate Prazniak and no DNA evidence linking Hooper to the killing.
- Hooper has spent roughly 27 years serving three concurrent life terms in Stillwater prison after earlier appeals were blocked by Minnesota’s two-year statute of limitations for post-conviction petitions.
- A Hennepin County judge will have up to 90 days to rule on the vacatur request while decisions on potential murder charges for Lewis are deferred until after the court’s review.