After spending nearly 30 years on death row, Anthony Ray Hinton will be freed on Friday morning after Alabama prosecutors told a judge this week they would not retry him. Hinton had been convicted of the 1985 slayings of two fast-food managers, but new testing did not match crime scene bullets to the gun found in his house. Hinton’s case was picked up by the Equal Justice Initiative in 1998, which fought for more than a decade to get the bullets retested. While EJI says the decision is evidence of Hinton’s innocence, Chief Deputy Jefferson County District Attorney John Bowers claimed, "There's no closure one way or the other. The experts did not say it did come from the pistol or that it didn't come from the pistol."
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