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BIRMINGHAM, Ala. (AP) —
A man who spent nearly 30 years on Alabama's death row was freed Friday after prosecutors finally acknowledged that the only evidence they had against him couldn't prove he committed the crime.
Ray Hinton, 58, walked out of the Jefferson County Jail in Birmingham and hugged his tearful family members. "Thank you Lord, thank you Jesus said his sister, Darlene Gardner, as she embraced him.
"I shouldn't have sat on death row for 30 years," Hinton told reporters. "All they had to do was test the gun."
Hinton was convicted of the 1985 murders of two Birmingham fast-food restaurant managers. Crime scene bullets were the only evidence linking him to the crime.
The U.S. Supreme Court ruled last year that Hinton had "constitutionally deficient" representation at his initial trial because Hinton's defense lawyer wrongly thought he had only $1,000 to hire a ballistics expert to try to rebut the prosecution testimony about the bullets. The only defense expert willing to take the job at that price struggled so much to answer questions on cross-examination that jurors chuckled at his responses.
Attorney Bryan Stevenson, director of the Alabama-based Equal Justice Initiative, said he was quickly able to independently re-test the gun and prove there was no match to the fatal bullets after taking on the case 16 years ago.
He pressed the state ever since to re-examine the evidence, but officials refused. Only while preparing for a retrial did the state test the bullets again, failing to prove a link to Hinton's mothers revolver. Only then did they move to dismiss the case.
"He was convicted because he was poor," Stevenson said outside the jail.
Hinton said he would continue to pray for the victims' families, since the state miscarried justice for them as well
"They had every intention of executing me for something I didn't do," Hinton said.
By ANGELA CHARLTON, AP
The co-pilot of the doomed Germanwings flight repeatedly sped up the plane as he used the automatic pilot to descend the A320 into the Alps, the French air accident investigation agency said Friday.
The chilling new detail from the BEA agency is based on an initial reading of the plane's "black box" data recorder, found blackened and buried at the crash site Thursday.
It strengthens investigators' initial suspicions that co-pilot Andreas Lubitz intentionally destroyed the plane - though prosecutors are still trying to figure out why. All 150 people aboard Flight 9525 from Barcelona to Duesseldorf were killed in the March 24 crash.
The BEA said the preliminary reading of the data recorder shows that the pilot used the automatic pilot to put the plane into a descent and then repeatedly during the descent adjusted the automatic pilot to speed up the plane.
The agency says it will continue studying the black box for more complete details of what happened. The Flight Data Recorder records aircraft parameters such as the speed, altitude, and actions of the pilot on the commands.
Based on recordings from the plane's other black box, the cockpit voice recorder, investigators say Lubitz locked the pilot out of the cockpit and deliberately crashed.
Lubitz spent time online researching suicide methods and cockpit door security in the week before crashing Flight 9525, prosecutors said Thursday - the first evidence that the fatal descent may have been a premeditated act.
German prosecutors have said Lubitz's medical records from before he received his pilot's license referred to "suicidal tendencies," and Lufthansa, Germanwings' parent company, said it knew six years ago that Lubitz had had an episode of "severe depression" before he finished his flight training.
In Marseille, prosecutor Brice Robin said that his investigation focuses on France for now, but he has filed a formal request for judicial cooperation from Germany that could expand the scope of his probe.
Robin underlined French investigators' conviction that he was conscious until the moment of impact, and appears to have acted repeatedly to stop an excessive speed alarm from sounding.
"It's a voluntary action that guided this plane toward the mountain, not only losing altitude but correcting the aircraft's speed," he said Thursday.
The mountain rescue officer who found the data recorder, Alice Coldefy, described Friday the unexpected discovery in a spot that had already been repeatedly searched.
"I found a pile of clothes, we were searching it, we were moving them downhill and while doing this I discovered a box. The color of the box was the same as the gravel, of the so-called black boxes are actually orange, but this one had burned up in the crash and blended with the dark earth covering the area, known to local guides as "the black lands."
"I didn't realize I had found it and I wasn't thinking it was possible to find it among all this debris," she said.
Mountain officers and trained dogs are continuing to search the site. When the terrain is fully cleared of body parts and belongings, a private company will take out the large airplane debris.
CHARLOTTE, N.C. (AP) --
A man who set sail from South Carolina two months ago was rescued on the overturned hull of his sailboat 200 miles off the coast of North Carolina, and he said he got by rationing his water and energy and praying for help.
"Every day I was like, `Please God, send me some rain, send me some water,'" Louis Jordan, 37, told WAVY-TV (http://bit.ly/1FpmfUd ).
The crew of a German-flagged container ship found Louis Jordan floating on his vessel, the 35-foot Angel, on Thursday afternoon.
Jordan said he initially did not believe the container ship was real when he saw it. He said the ship's crew did not see him until he began waving his arms.
"I waved my hands real slowly, and that's the signal `I'm in distress help me,'" he told WAVY. "I blew my whistles. I had three whistles. They never heard them. I turned my American flag upside down and put that up. That says, `rescue me.'"
A Coast Guard helicopter crew from North Carolina airlifted Jordan from the ship to a hospital in Norfolk, Virginia, on Thursday night. He had a shoulder injury and was dehydrated, the Coast Guard and his family said.
But Jordan was in good condition and refused treatment at the facility, according to Sentara Norfolk General Hospital spokesman Dale Gauding. Jordan left the hospital with his parents around 2 a.m. Friday.