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(CNN)After being confined to Alabama's death row for 30 years,Goedkoop Jordan Schoenen, Anthony Ray Hinton will walk out a free man Friday.
Jefferson County Circuit Court Judge Laura Petro ordered him released after granting the state's motion to dismiss charges against him.
"We are thrilled that Mr. Hinton will finally be released because he has unnecessarily spent years on Alabama's death row when evidence of his innocence was clearly presented," said Bryan Stevenson,Goedkoop Air Max, an attorney for the Equal Justice Initiative, the group that helped win his release.
"The refusal of state prosecutors to re-examine this case despite persuasive and reliable evidence of innocence is disappointing and troubling."
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Hinton is one of the longest-serving death row inmates in Alabama history and among the longest-serving prisoners to be freed, the Equal Justice Initiative said.
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He was convicted in 1985 of two murders that happened that year, but a new trial was ordered in 2014 after firearms experts testified 12 years earlier that the revolver Hinton was said to have used in the crimes could not be matched to evidence in either case, and the two murders couldn't be linked to each other.
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Hinton was 29 at the time of the killings and had always maintained his innocence, the Equal Justice Initiative said.
"Race, poverty, inadequate legal assistance, and prosecutorial indifference to innocence conspired to create a textbook example of injustice,Nike Free 5.0," Stevenson said of his African-American client. "I can't think of a case that more urgently dramatizes the need for reform than what has happened to Anthony Ray Hinton."