Rosario hasn’t been cleared: Bronx District Attorney Darcel Clark agreed to recommend dismissing his conviction, but not the charges themselves, while she reinvestigates the killing of 16-year-old George Collazo. Prosecutors could ultimately decide to retry Rosario or to drop the charges.

“A modicum of justice has occurred today,” said one of his lawyers, Glenn Garber of the Exoneration Initiative. But “he’s not been fully vindicated, and we hope he will be soon.”

Rosario’s release came two months after Clark succeeded 27-year DA Robert Johnson and days ahead of a planned released of a “Dateline” digital series on NBCNews.com on the case. It adds to a roster of more than 25 convictions from New York City’s high-crime 1980s and ’90s that prosecutors have disavowed in the last five years.

Rosario’s attorneys called his case an illustration of unreliable eyewitness testimony, bungled defense and the difficulty of fighting a guilty verdict.

Rosario, now 40, was arrested after two witnesses identified him from a police photo book as the man who’d shot George Collazo in the head after an exchange of words on a Bronx street on June 19, 1996. No forensic or physical evidence tied Rosario to the crime.

He said he’d been staying with friends in Deltona, Florida, and he listed over a dozen people he said had seen him there.

Police didn’t contact those people, according to Rosario’s current lawyers. And his own court-appointed attorneys at the time didn’t fully explore the alibi witnesses, either.

After phoning the witnesses proved difficult, his initial attorney got a judge’s OK to pay to send a private investigator to Florida, but the attorney later acknowledged she never did it. Another lawyer who took over before Rosario’s trial mistakenly thought the court had nixed funding for the investigator’s Florida trip and didn’t pursue it further, according to a 2010 Appeals Court decision.

The couple who said they’d hosted Rosario testified at his trial and said they had good reason to remember his presence and other details from the day of Collazo’s killing: Their first child was born the next day. But the trial prosecutor urged jurors to discount them because of their friendship with Rosario.

During Rosario’s appeal, a judge said additional alibi witnesses wouldn’t have added significantly to his defense. Rosario’s lawyers argue otherwise, noting that some of the witnesses weren’t close with Rosario and so might have been more difficult to discredit. Several of them did ultimately participate in the case, testifying at an appellate hearing in 2004.

For now, Rosario headed home Wednesday with his wife and their two children, both born before he was arrested. He declined to talk about his case as he left court.

Instead, he called for freeing other people who are fighting their own convictions.

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