GREENFIELD — A former Greenfield man serving a life sentence for a 1994 murder was released from prison on Tuesday, three and a half months after the state Supreme Judicial Court ordered that a new trial be held in his case.

Elvio J. Marrero, 63, posted $5,000 bail in Franklin County Superior Court. He is required to wear a GPS monitoring device and reside with family in Lowell while he awaits his new trial, which a court clerk said will likely be scheduled toward the end of the year. Marrero also will have to follow a curfew of 9 p.m. to 7 a.m.

Marrero walked out of the Franklin County Justice Center at around noon to cheers from members of the Boston College Innocence Program, which fought for years to get Marrero a new trial. He tested his GPS by walking with his allies to the All Souls Church across the street before crossing Main Street and strolling to the Post Office before everyone walked back. His attorney, Ira Gant, said Marrero is elated to be free and looking forward to clearing his name.

“We’re all very excited that [he was released] and that he gets to be with his family after all these years,” said Gant, who works for the Committee for Public Counsel Services and represents Marrero, alongside attorneys from the Boston College Innocence Program. “One step closer to full justice for Mr. Marrero.”

The conviction was overturned based on DNA evidence obtained in 2017 or 2018, removing a key piece of evidence the prosecution used to convict his client in 1995, according to the SJC ruling.

Marrero had appealed to the Supreme Judicial Court in 1998, 2002 and 2011, but his conviction was upheld each of those times. In 2022, Gant was joined by the Boston College Innocence Program’s Lauren Jacobs and Charlotte Whitmore in arguing in Franklin County Superior Court in favor of a motion to dismiss. This motion, however, also was denied. The state Supreme Judicial Court on Jan. 11 ordered a new trial.

Laurie Loisel, spokesperson with the Northwestern District Attorney’s Office, said DA’s office intends to retry Marrero. A pretrial conference has been scheduled for June 5.

Pernell R. Kimplin, who was 26 at the time of his death, was last seen alive in his Greenfield apartment on the evening of Oct. 13, 1994. He was found dead in the apartment three days later. He had been gagged, and his hands and feet were tied with electrical cords and rope. He had been stabbed once in the chest and once in the back and had been beaten on his head, neck, shoulders and back with a wooden board broken from a dresser drawer. The medical examiner found that the victim died on or about Oct. 14 as a result of the stab wounds.

Defense attorneys have long argued that Marrero was out of the country when the murder happened.

At the 2022 multi-session motion hearing, Lori Levinson, one of the defense attorneys in 1996, took the stand and testified that she had investigated an alibi defense for Marrero, who claimed to be in the Dominican Republic when Kimplin was killed. She said the defense team’s paralegals worked tirelessly to get American Airlines — the airline Marrero used to fly to the Dominican Republic — to turn over passenger name records and “ran into brick wall after brick wall” before receiving them in the middle of the trial.

The document, Levinson testified, looked like “codes and initials and things,” including the letters “ADA.” Levinson explained that her team fruitlessly tried to determine what these letters stood for during the trial, only for Levinson to learn through Gant’s investigation that they were a capitalization of Ada, the first name of the travel agent who took Marrero’s reservation and who testified via Zoom from her Florida home in 2022.

The document also contained a phone number with a 413 area code, which Levinson said made it unlikely the reservation belonged to another E. Marrero, as the prosecution had suggested. However, Levinson said, the phone number could not be connected to anyone.

Reach Domenic Poli at: dpoli@recorder.com or 413-930-4120.