When Pervis Payne walked into a Memphis courtroom on Tuesday morning, he hugged his attorney and sobbed.

“It’s OK,” his lawyer whispered in his ear. “I got you.”

Since 1988, Payne has been on death row for a stabbing that killed a young woman and her daughter and wounded her son. Payne says he didn’t do it — that he found the family on his way to visit his girlfriend, who lived in an apartment across the hall. He says he tried to help the victims.

But to police, Payne was a Black man at the scene of a bloody attack against a white family. They arrested him shortly after.

Payne’s sister, Rolanda Holman, was just 13 when he went to trial.

“I remember the judge sentencing him to death by way of the electric chair, and then he said, May God have mercy on his soul,” she said after a hearing Tuesday. “I’m grateful for 34 years later that God did have mercy on his soul.”

Moments earlier, a judge had vacated Payne’s death sentence thanks to a new Tennessee law that allows people on death row with intellectual disabilities to ask for a lesser sentence. Payne’s attorneys pushed for the legislation, noting that both the state and federal Supreme Courts had ruled people with intellectual disabilities shouldn’t be executed.

A recent evaluation found that Payne fit those criteria. So, last week, prosecutors dropped their fight for the death penalty.

The Shelby County District attorney said the victims’ family was not happy. But for Payne, the judge’s ruling brought a moment of reprieve more than three decades in the making.

“What a difference it makes to be able to wake up in the morning and not have to feel like you have to fight for your life,” says Payne’s attorney, Kelley Henry. She’s the one who held him in court as he cried.

It was a rare moment of relief for a federal public defender who is the last line of defense for more than half of the members of Tennessee’s death row.

The past few years have been particularly tough. After a nearly decade-long hiatus, the state executed seven people in a year-and-a-half.

The federal government also carried out a spate of executions near the end of the Trump administration. Henry contracted COVID while trying to prevent one.

“I fear that Tennessee could be like the federal government in 2022 and 2023 with execution after execution,” she says.

The state currently has three executions on the books for next year. Henry is worried about how they’ll be carried out, following a botched lethal injection in Oklahoma last month that caused a man to vomit and convulse. Multiple people in Tennessee have opted for death by electric chair in recent years, because they thought it would be less painful.

So, the future is uncertain. But, this month, judges have overturned two of Henry’s client’s death sentences: Payne’s and Abu-Ali Abdur’Rahman’s (a judge exchanged Abdur’Rahman’s death sentence for life in prison, citing racial discrimination at his trial).

Henry is grateful for this moment. But she is still determined to prove Payne’s innocence.

“Justice does not come from the execution of an innocent man or the incarceration of an innocent man,” she says.

Next, Payne’s defense team will ask a judge to re-sentence him to life with the possibility of parole. Then, they’ll continue to search for evidence that could exonerate him. They have also asked Gov. Bill Lee for clemency, though his office says they’ll refer Payne’s case to the parole board, now that he’s no longer facing execution.

Even though prosecutors gave up on the death sentence, they’re still standing by Payne’s conviction. So, while he’ll move off death row, he won’t be leaving prison — at least not for now.

Katie Riordan of WKNO contributed reporting.