A quarter century after a northern Minnesota jury convicted Brian Pippitt of first-degree murder of an elderly woman who ran a tiny country store, the 63-year-old Aitkin County man walked out of the geriatric unit at Faribault prison on Jan. 7.
Pippitt’s freedom came after a decadelong legal and political fight by Centurion Ministries, a national nonprofit dedicated to vindicating the wrongly convicted, and the Minnesota-based Great North Innocence Project.
Pippitt was convicted in 2001 for the 1998 murder of Evelyn Malin, an 84-year-old widow who had run the Dollar Lake Store in a rural area north of Mille Lacs Lake for more than half a century. He was sentenced to life in prison, and his conviction was upheld on appeal.
Pippitt’s saga was detailed in a Minnesota Star Tribune story last year.
Pippitt’s attorneys had long argued that there was no forensic or physical evidence connecting him to the crime, and that his conviction rested solely on testimony from two witnesses who both later recanted under oath.
In 2024, the Minnesota Attorney General’s Conviction Review Unit (CRU) recommended Pippitt’s exoneration.
Some 1,200 inmates have applied to have the CRU review their cases since the unit opened in 2021. In the four years since the unit began accepting applications, Pippitt’s case was only the third in which the CRU recommended relief.
In September, the Minnesota Board of Pardons — comprised of the governor, the attorney general and the chief justice — voted 2-1 to commute Pippitt’s life sentence, three years before he was eligible for parole.
