A man imprisoned for over 20 years for the 1997 shooting death of another man in New Orleans was freed last week after prosecutors agreed that his conviction should be vacated CBS News reports.

Court records show a motion to vacate the conviction of 47-year-old Cedric L. Dent, in the shooting death of Anthony Milton was granted by a judge last week. The district attorney’s office agreed not to continue prosecuting the case.

The shooting happened outside a New Orleans supermarket in 1997.

The Innocence Project New Orleans organization says its investigation determined that prosecutors in the 1990s withheld documents that showed a witness to the shooting gave a description that didn’t match Dent. Along with a key witness’s story changed multiple times before he testified at the trial.

The documents that were withheld revealed other witnesses also gave descriptions of the gunman that didn’t match Dent, CBS New Orleans affiliate WWL-TV reported.

“Cedric Dent is a victim of the failures of every system that was put in place to protect his rights as a person accused of a crime – a police department that did the bare minimum to investigate a serious crime; lawyers that didn’t have the resources or the wherewithal to investigate his case; and a district attorney’s office that concealed evidence that should have been turned over and would have helped Mr. Dent get the not guilty verdict he deserved at trial,” Meredith Angelson, one of Dent’s lawyers, said in a statement.

A statement from District Attorney Jason Williams’ office noted that Dent was convicted by a non-unanimous jury – a verdict that would not now be accepted under Louisiana law or U.S. Supreme Court precedent.

“After a thorough review of Mr. Dent’s case, our office concluded that — like many convictions decided by non-unanimous jury – his guilty verdict stemmed from a trial that was unfair precisely because one of the twelve jurors had voted to acquit and because of constitutionally ineffective assistance from his defense attorney,” the statement said. “The legal system failed Mr. Dent, and just as significantly, failed the victim of this crime and his family.”

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