Joe D. Bryan, a former high school principal who was released from prison in Texas after serving 33 years for a murder conviction based on expert testimony that was later discreditedjilipark, and whose claims of innocence drew intense media scrutiny, died on Sept. 22 at his home in Houston. He was 84.

The cause was cancer of the pancreas and liver, said his brother James Bryan, with whom he had lived.

Mr. Bryan was granted parole in March 2020 by the Texas Board of Pardons and Paroles. Its decision followed a campaign to free Mr. Bryan by the Innocence Project of Texas, an effort that accelerated after a two-part investigation published by ProPublica and The New York Times Magazine in 2018.

The reporting, by Pamela Colloff, questioned the soundness of expert forensic testimony about blood splatters, the primary evidence used to convict Mr. Bryan in the death of his wife, Mickey Bryan. One of his supporters was the best-selling novelist John Grisham, who based his 2019 thriller, “The Guardians,” partly on the Bryan case. “I strongly believe Joe is innocent,” Mr. Grisham wrote to the parole board.

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The case was held up as an example of the misuse of so-called bloodstain-pattern analysis, a forensic discipline that has long been a staple of courtroom evidence but that has increasingly come to be considered unreliable and misleading.

The case also epitomized the difficulty in persuading judges to reopen murder convictions even when there are credible claims of innocence. The Texas Court of Criminal Appeals, the highest criminal court in the state, denied Mr. Bryan’s efforts to receive a new trial in early 2020, two months before he was paroled. Though released from prison, his conviction still stood.

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