ROCHESTER, NY - A man whose delusional ramblings led to him being convicted of killing a community activist 10 years ago was freed Tuesday after DNA tests that prosecutors initially tried to block tied the slaying to another man.

"All I can say is God is good," Douglas Warney, bent over in a wheelchair with advanced AIDS, said after being greeted jubilantly outside the courtroom by family, friends and supporters who cheered, clapped and yelled "Freedom, Freedom!"

Warney, 44, who has an eighth-grade education and an IQ of 68, confessed details about the frenzied New Year's Day stabbing in 1996 of a local Million Man March organizer, William Beason, that police insisted only the killer could know.

But Warney's defenders argued that he simply parroted details two detectives gave him in an interrogation room at a time when he was stricken with AIDS-related dementia.

A series of DNA tests that prosecutors first blocked in court in 2004 recently produced evidence pointing to an inmate, Eldred Johnson Jr., as the culprit. Authorities say Johnson confessed last week to killing Beason two weeks after slashing the throat of his landlord in Utica _ a killing he pleaded guilty to in 1998.

With the agreement of prosecutors, a state Supreme Court judge, Thomas Van Strydonck, vacated Warney's second-degree murder conviction and sentence of 25 years to life and ordered him released.

"It was clear that the blood at the scene was not Mr. Warney's or the victim's but (that of) another unidentified person," the judge said. A state DNA database of convicted felons, he added, eventually led authorities to Johnson, who admitted "that he and he alone killed Mr. Beason."

The judge commended Monroe County District Attorney Michael Green for his efforts "to do the right thing" in securing Warney's release.

But Peter Neufeld, who took up Warney's case in 2004 on behalf of the Innocence Project, a New York legal clinic that tries to free wrongly convicted inmates, described as "irresponsible" the lengthy legal efforts to prevent blood evidence from being reanalyzed using sophisticated DNA methods than weren't available a decade ago.

Neufeld wants a special prosecutor to examine allegations of police misconduct in the case. The detectives "fed those nonpublic details" about the crime scene to Warney "and had them all attributed to Doug," he said. "If this interview had been videotaped, everybody would know the details came from the police officers and not Doug."