updated 10:35 p.m. ET July 24, 2008

Paul Gregory House has known many prisons.

Death row. His own body ravaged by multiple sclerosis. A long, legal limbo that traps him between judges who've said he may be innocent — and state prosecutors who've refused to give up.

On July 2, unable to walk or feed himself, he was wheeled out of a hospital prison in Nashville, turned over to his mother, fitted with an electronic tracking bracelet, and placed under house arrest. His new trial for first-degree murder is scheduled to begin Oct. 14.

This time, Union County District Attorney General Paul Phillips won't seek the death penalty. But he still thinks House should be incarcerated for the rest of his life.

For 22 years, House has been accused of raping and killing a neighbor in the clannish, dirt-poor hills of eastern Tennessee's Union County, a place where even in the 1980s, some houses still lacked indoor plumbing.

He was sentenced to death in 1986. Since then, his appeals have bumped up and down a long legal staircase, ultimately reaching the U.S. Supreme Court, which questioned his guilt in a landmark 2006 ruling and ordered a new trial.

No "reasonable juror," the high court said, would have convicted House after seeing DNA results, a testing technology not available at the time of his trial. Nor, the justices noted, would jurors have been convinced beyond a reasonable doubt if they'd heard witnesses — who didn't come forward until years later — describe the victim's husband as a drunken abuser who confessed to killing her.

A federal judge ordered House released pending a new trial. But he stayed locked up for two more years while state prosecutors filed procedural challenges.

He remains accused.

Carolyn Muncey goes missing
On July 14, 1985, folks were looking for Carolyn Muncey, a 29-year-old mother of two young children. She had been missing for at least 12 hours from her home, a four-room shack without running water; her husband, Hubert "Little Hube" Muncey, said he was out drinking beer at a local dance the night she disappeared.

Around 3 p.m, they found her shoeless body in a roadside ditch. She was lying on her side, her hands bloodstained to the wrists. Her floral housecoat had cinched under her armpits, as if she had been dragged by her legs, which were scratched and bruised, across the wooded hills.

She had been an attractive woman before someone blackened her eye, left a necklace of bruises around her throat and hit her hard enough to dislodge her brain from its moorings — a blow the coroner said caused her death.

Authorities claimed House lured Muncey from her dilapidated cabin, beat her, killed her, and then dumped her body in a branch-filled culvert about 100 yards up the road from her driveway.

There were no witnesses. The evidence was circumstantial: semen stains on her white cotton panties and silky green nightgown; a pair of muddy jeans with reddish spots belonging to House.

Guilty, the jury said. And it spent less than four hours deciding he should be put to death.

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