A man who was freed recently after 25 years in prison for the infamous 1990 subway murder of a Utah tourist is suing the city for wrongful imprisonment.

In a Manhattan federal lawsuit filed Thursday, Johnny Hincapie said the NYPD officers who arrested him in September 1990 for the murder of Brain Watkins set him up for the fall because they needed to close the high-profile case during “New York City’s darkest era.”

“So high-profile was this killing, and such was its threat to the city’s tourism industry, that the Mayor and District Attorney faced unusual pressures to deliver immediate results,” according to the lawsuit, filed by lawyers Gabriel Harvis and Baree Fett.

The lawsuit claims that says that officers who arrested Hincapie “used unconstitutional tactics to declare ‘case closed’ within twenty- four hours,” including threatening him physically and falsely promising he would be sent home if he told the police what they wanted to hear.

Hincapie, who is now 45 years old, was tossed in prison for participating in Watkins’ brutal stabbing when he was just 18 years old.

He was released from prison in 2015 after a New York state judge found insufficient evidence to keep him locked up, including a new witness who came forward after reading about Hincapie’s appeal in The Post.

“Earlier this year while at work, [the woman] came across the New York Post newspaper’s coverage of the hearing and developments in the case. She knew Johnny had not participated in the crime,” the judge wrote in his decision to free Hincapie.

An appeals court upheld the lower court’s ruling in 2016. And the Manhattan District Attorney’s office declined to retry the case last year, citing the death of key witnesses.

“Mr. Hincapie suffered severe emotional and mental anguish and pain as a result of being punished for crimes he did not commit,” the lawsuit says.

He is seeking damages to be determined by a jury at trial.

A spokesman for the city’s Law Department said it will review the complaint.

Watkins and his parents had just returned from the US Open tennis tournament when a gang of muggers encircled them inside the East 53rd Street subway station at Seventh Avenue.

Watkins, 22, was stabbed in the heart when he jumped in front of his parents to protect them.