Joyce Faulkner keeps a list of the births, weddings, funerals and other family events that David Faulkner has missed following his 2001 conviction for a murder he has always insisted he did not commit. She also tallies the number of days he has been behind bars.

She hopes those figures will soon cease and she can begin to see him in the world again as a free and exonerated man.

"He has kept hope the entire 20-year period," Joyce Faulkner said of her son, who is 54. "How, I don't know."

A Maryland state appellate court in April vacated the murder convictions for Faulkner and for Jonathan Smith, 50, after a palm print left at the scene of the 1987 murder was identified as belonging to another man with a history of burglaries.

The Maryland Court of Appeals determined that a jury may not have convicted neither Faulkner, who is represented pro bono by Gibson Dunn & Crutcher LLP, nor Smith, who is represented pro bono by Skadden Arps Slate Meagher & Flom LLP, had they known that the palm print belonged to the other individual, who was not associated with the two men.

A searchable database of palm prints was not available to investigators at the time of the January 1987 murder, which authorities suspected occurred after the woman, Adeline Wilford, came home as it was being burglarized.

Plugging the print into the database turned up the other man, who an informant had once pointed to as the culprit in the murder, said Don Salzman, a Skadden attorney who represented Smith.

"That was the real turning point in the case," said Salzman, who also sits on the board of the Mid-Atlantic Innocence Project, which worked on the case together with the Innocence Project, Skadden and Gibson Dunn.

Yet even with the identified palm print, it took several years for the attorneys to get the 2001 convictions overturned for Smith and Faulkner.

Their cases were complicated by Smith once purportedly confessing to an investigator that he, Faulkner and a minor had committed the crime, an unrecorded confession that Smith later recanted and said had been coerced, according to court documents.

Their cases were also complicated by Smith's aunt telling investigators that on the day of the murder, she had seen her nephew in the vicinity of Wilford's house with blood on his shirt, walking together with Faulkner and the minor, according to court documents.

But recordings of conversations in February 2001 between the aunt and the investigator — the same person who obtained the confession from Smith — put a spotlight on the aunt's motives.

Those recordings, which attorneys obtained through Public Information Act requests, revealed that the aunt had demanded that if authorities did not dismiss unrelated drug charges against her grandson, she would testify "favorably" towards the defendants, according to the April ruling by the Maryland Court of Appeals.

"We do not order the granting of these writs of actual innocence lightly," the April ruling reads. "Nor do we predict the outcome of Smith's and Faulkner's new trials, should the state elect to try them. Nevertheless, we are convinced that new trials are warranted in light of the newly discovered evidence."

Prosecutors could not be reached for comment on whether they intend to retry Faulkner and Smith for the crimes.

"The real victory will be when [Faulkner] is reunited with his family," said John W.F. Chesley, an attorney with Gibson Dunn.

Arianna Scavetti, a Gibson Dunn attorney who also worked on the case, said the cases for Smith and Faulkner provided numerable twists and turns along the way, with investigators resisting efforts by attorneys to obtain the identity of the person who matched with the palm print and with lower courts denying innocence petitions and motions to reopen post-conviction proceedings filed by the two men.

"This has been a long time coming, there have been a lot of disappointing decisions along the way," Scavetti said. "It's been a great lesson in perseverance."

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--Editing by Katherine Rautenberg.