You can look it up: The state Department of Correction's Web site, with its cool "offender search" feature, tells us that Inmate No. 0072845 was a beneficiary of Central Prison's hospitality for 4,887 days.

That's 13-plus years, broken down into the incomprehensible tedium of days and the gnawing fears of restless nights, in the company of all those delightful characters in the dashing red jump suits who are penned in that section of the prison where nobody's supposed to leave until he gets a fatal poke with a needle.

Glen Edward Chapman walked out, to freedom. The state now lists his inmate status as "inactive." A nice gesture, right?

Well, they could have thrown a little farewell party, but that's not the way it works. As two of his lawyers related in a Point of View article we ran Friday, when the word came down that prosecutors would not proceed with the new trial to which Chapman was entitled, he was given a few minutes to get his stuff together and shown out the door.

No doubt that when you've held a guy on death row for 4,887 days on the basis of a corrupted trial, you don't want to dilly-dally when the whole outrageous travesty collapses.

But for Glen Chapman, who is 41, there was no counseling, no resettlement assistance. He'll just have to try to pick up the pieces the best he can on his own, after all those years locked up waiting to be executed for crimes he always insisted he didn't commit -- and which the state now agrees it can't prove he committed.

It took Superior Court Judge Robert C. Ervin the better part of five years to determine in a series of hearings that Chapman had, essentially, been framed. The order granting a new trial was issued in November. Now the police in Hickory have two unsolved murders on their hands.

Or maybe one. Chapman was convicted in the deaths of Betty Jean Ramseur and Tenene Yvette Conley, whose bodies were found, separately, in abandoned houses in the summer of 1992. But as Ervin pointed out, there was a lack of evidence that Conley had been slain; she may well have died of a drug overdose.

As if that weren't bad enough, the judge concluded that detectives on the case had failed to report witnesses' accounts that Conley was seen alive after Chapman supposedly did her in.

What about Betty Jean Ramseur? Ervin determined that a key investigator failed to disclose several important facts that would have helped Chapman -- and even lied in court. There was no physical evidence linking Chapman to the crime.

Imagine his despair when his appeal to the state Supreme Court fell on deaf ears. To read back through that 1995 opinion, so confident in tone, is to endure another lesson in the criminal justice system's vulnerability when people on the front lines -- not the court itself, of course -- act in bad faith.

In considering appeals on points of law, the Supreme Court doesn't try to second-guess a jury on the credibility of evidence. And it's true that one witness, a cousin of Chapman's, testified that Chapman told her he had killed Ramseur by slamming her in the head with a brick. So, the scenario painted by the prosecution might have rung true. But what if the justices had known about the exculpatory evidence, including someone else's confession? (And the cousin later said she had lied.)

The court went along with Chapman's death sentence in large part because he'd been found guilty of killing two people. It drew a picture, in an opinion signed by now-retired Justice Willis Whichard, of Chapman that resembles a budding serial murderer. Although the opinion noted that Chapman had denied killing either of the victims, he was faulted for having no remorse.

"Finally," the court said, "there is no discernible reason why defendant killed these two women; the murders appear to be 'the product of pure meanness.' " Should the absence of motive perhaps have been a clue that he didn't actually do it?

Justice John Webb, also now in retirement, might have smelled something fishy. He said in a dissent that Chapman should have been granted two new trials. "The murders occurred two months apart," he wrote. "I believe that without more of a showing of one scheme to murder two persons it was error to consolidate the cases for trial."

Consolidation worked in the prosecution's favor, as it created the impression of someone who had a taste for blood and who was an excellent candidate for the death chamber. And that's where Glen Chapman might well have ended up if dogged attorneys and investigators, and a conscientious judge, hadn't untangled the web of deceit that officers of the law used to ensnare him. Did the system work? At least, there was no execution to dramatize in merciless detail how a gross miscarriage of justice could have been even grosser.