New Orleans man walks free after judge axes murder conviction 36 years later

John Floyd, pictured here, was freed Thursday. (Emily Maw/Innocence Project New Orleans via AP)

NEW ORLEANS – A man who was imprisoned for 36 years walked free Thursday after a federal judge threw out his murder conviction and life sentence for a newspaper editor's stabbing in the French Quarter of New Orleans.

During a brief hearing, a federal judge formally signed off on the planned release of John Floyd. He walked free minutes later.

The judge's order says Floyd will live in Carencro, Louisiana, on supervised release.

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In May, U.S. District Judge Sarah Vance had ordered prosecutors to either retry Floyd or release him within 120 days.

But the case doesn't end there. District Attorney Leon Cannizzaro's office agreed to Floyd's release while it appeals the judge's earlier decision to toss out his 1982 conviction.

Vance ruled in September that no reasonable juror would find Floyd guilty of murder based on all the evidence in the November 1980 stabbing death of William Hines, who was a Times-Picayune copy editor.

Floyd had confessed to killing Hines and another man -- three days and one mile apart and under similar circumstances. But the judge said new evidence supports Floyd's claim that police beat him to coerce a confession.

Vance said Floyd's conviction was based entirely on his statements to police investigators, who didn't uncover any physical evidence or eyewitness testimony linking Floyd to the crime scene.

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Floyd, now 67, was a 32-year-old "drifter" living in the French Quarter when Hines and Rodney Robinson, a businessman, were stabbed to death. Both victims were gay and were killed after apparently sharing a drink and having consensual sex with their attacker.

Police found Hines' body in his bedroom on Nov. 26, 1980, and believed he was killed a day earlier by a welcomed visitor. Robinson's body was found on Nov. 28, 1980, in the hallway of a downtown hotel.

Floyd has been in custody since January 1981, when police arrested him at a French Quarter bar. Floyd testified that a police detective, John Dillman, and another officer bought him five or six beers at the bar before his arrest.

Floyd also testified that Dillman beat him during his interrogation after he initially denied killing Hines or Robinson.

A judge acquitted Floyd of murder in Robinson's killing but convicted him of second degree murder in Hines' death.

In her ruling last year, Vance said physical evidence at the scene of Robinson's death excluded the possibility that Floyd killed him "in the manner described in his confession." Instead, the evidence pointed to a killer of a different race and blood type than Floyd.

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"If Floyd was willing -- for whatever reason -- to falsely confess to one murder, it is far more likely that his other confession is false as well," the judge wrote. "The considerable evidence tending to undermine the Robinson confession, therefore, also serves to undercut the Hines confession."

The National Registry of Exonerations has examined 2,049 exonerations in the U.S. since 1989 and found it included 245 cases of innocent men and women who confessed, according to registry senior researcher Maurice Possley. Nearly 75 percent of those false confessions were in homicide cases, Possley said in an email.

Prosecutors have claimed that before giving written confessions to police, Floyd had "freely boasted" that he killed both men after picking them up in French Quarter gay bars.

"He twice presented evidence during his initial prosecution to prove that Detective Dillman had beaten his confession out of him, which the trial court failed to find credible either time," Assistant District Attorney Andrew Pickett wrote in a 2012 court filing.

Floyd's attorneys said he couldn't read the confessions he signed, has an IQ of 59 and a "highly suggestible personality," leaving him vulnerable to giving a false confession.

"The State of Louisiana has inflicted a grave injustice on a vulnerable citizen in violation of the Constitution and, when presented with evidence of this, has utterly failed to acknowledge or remedy the injustice," his attorneys wrote in a 2011 court filing.