By Sky News US Team
An inmate who spent nearly 30 years on death row in Alabama has walked free because of insufficient evidence against him.
"Thank you Jesus," said Anthony Ray Hinton, 58, as he emerged from Jefferson County Jail in Birmingham to hug his family.
Mr Hinton said he could have been spared incarceration if only the authorities had tested the gun in the murders he was convicted of committing.
Prosecutors decided not to retry Mr Hinton for the killings of two fast-food managers in Birmingham in 1985 after experts failed to determine that the bullets were fired from the revolver found at his house.
The six crime-scene bullets were the crux of the evidence against him.
Mr Hinton has been in jail since age 29, most of the time in a solitary death row cell.
Alabama Circuit Court Judge Laura Petro dismissed the case on Thursday a little over a year after the conviction was overturned by the US Supreme Court.
"The connection has always been the bullets," said Chief Deputy District Attorney John Bowers.
Asked if Mr Hinton was wrongly convicted, Mr Bowers said he could not say because his "experts haven't ruled him in. They haven't ruled him out".
"I don't have the evidence necessary to proceed with prosecution. I don't have the evidence to prove this beyond a reasonable doubt anymore," he said.
Bryan Stevenson, Mr Hinton's lawyer and director of the Alabama-based Equal Justice Initiative, a group that champions the rights of poor and minority prisoners in the justice system, said his client was "overjoyed".
"Every day, every month, every year that the state took from him, they took something that they don't have the power to give back.
"While this moment is quite joyous and is quite wonderful, this case is quite tragic."
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