Where's The Real Killer, Alabama?

This past week, an innocent man was freed from death row in Alabama, after being held hostage by the judicial system for nearly thirty years. After a murder in 1985, a trial, involving actual evidence, apparently was not important. Ballistics from the alleged murder weapon, as in whether or not the bullets actually came from the gun police randomly decided COULD have been the murder weapon, were never even requested by the prosecution. The defense had only a limited amount to spend on expert testimony, and no one cared. Anthony Ray Hinton spent thirty years on death row for a crime he did not commit.

Prosecutors are not held to very high standards. There is a prosecutor in Northeast Kansas whose son damaged her vehicle by driving it through a neighbor's crops, and when the neighbor complained and the vehicle wouldn't run properly, she attempted to accuse a random constituent (who happens to be an older woman who has never worked on cars) of sabotage! No demand for responsibility on the part of her own son! She even fixed the vehicle her son damaged and gave it back to him, allowing him, once again, to prey upon the neighbors' fields, gardens, and mailboxes! But that's small potatoes compared to Hinton's case, and others like it, that have been bungled, not only because of prosecutorial misconduct and indifference, but enabled by the level of comfort felt by the general public when the wrong person, in an inordinate number of cases, a black person, is convicted of a crime he or she did not commit. In this case, no one even looked for the actual perpetrator, who apparently got away with murder. How many more murders could this person have committed in thirty years?

Half a life behind bars cannot actually be repaid to Mr. Hinton. Neither can a damaged reputation or thirty years worth of lost opportunities. How will the prosecution go about attempting to make right any murders committed by the real killer in this case, who was never prosecuted? Was the racist indifference worth it, Alabama?