Alabama inmate to be freed after 30 years on death row

An inmate on Alabama's death row for nearly 30 years will go free after prosecutors said there was not enough evidence to link him to the 1985 murders he was convicted of the committing.

Jefferson County Circuit Court Judge Laura Petro dismissed the case against Anthony Ray Hinton on Thursday morning, according to local news website AL.com. Three ballistics experts said “they could not conclusively determine” that any of the six bullets used in the murders came from a gun found in Hinton’s home, AL.com reported.

Hinton had been linked to the shooting deaths of fast-food workers John Davidson and Thomas Vason at restaurants near Birmingham, based on eyewitness testimony from a surviving restaurant manager and the prosecution’s ballistics experts, according to AL.com.

But his attorneys at the Equal Justice Initiative in Montgomery argued in a motion for dismissal that Hinton’s coworkers confirmed that he was working at a warehouse 15 miles away on the night of the double murder.

Hinton was granted a re-trial by the Supreme Court after it found that his attorney hired a subpar ballistics expert. When his lawyers at the Equal Justice Initiative hired nationally recognized experts, they showed that the bullets fired could not have come from Hinton’s gun.

Chief Deputy Jefferson County District Attorney John Bowers told AL.com that he met with the families of Davidson and Vason, who were “upset and frustrated” by the news, but that they understood why the cases could not be prosecuted.

"It's never happened in all my years of prosecution," Bowers told AL.com of the dismissed charges of a death row inmate.

Hinton is expected to be released from prison Friday.

Al Jazeera and wire services