Lack of evidence frees inmate on death row

BIRMINGHAM, Ala. – A man who spent nearly 30 years on Alabama’s death row walked free Friday, two days after prosecutors acknowledged that the only evidence they had against him couldn’t prove he committed the crime.

Ray Hinton was 29 when he was arrested for two 1985 killings. Freed at age 58, with gray hair and a beard, he was embraced by his sobbing sisters outside the Jefferson County Jail.

Hinton had won a new trial last year after the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that his trial counsel was inadequate. Prosecutors on Wednesday moved to drop the case after new ballistics tests contradicted those done three decades ago. Experts couldn’t match crime scene bullets to a gun found in Hinton’s home.

“They had every intention of executing me for something I didn’t do,” Hinton said.

Hinton was arrested in 1985 for the murders of two Birmingham fast-food restaurant managers after the survivor of a third restaurant robbery identified Hinton as the gunman. Prosecution experts said at the trial that bullets recovered at all three crime scenes matched Hinton’s mother’s .38-caliber Smith & Wesson revolver. He was convicted despite an alibi: He had been at work inside a locked warehouse 15 minutes away during the third shooting.

“The only thing we’ve ever had to connect him to the two crimes here in Birmingham was the bullets matching the gun that was recovered from his home,” Chief Deputy District Attorney John R. Bowers Jr. told the Associated Press on Thursday.

Attorney Bryan Stevenson, who directs Alabama’s Equal Justice Initiative, called it “a case study” in what is wrong with the judicial system. He said the trial was tainted by racial bias and that Hinton, an impoverished African-American man, did not have access to a better defense.