A man who spent 41 years behind bars for a murder he said he did not commit can now put the long-running case behind him, after prosecutors opted not to try him again for the 1984 killing of his friend in her Massachusetts apartment.

In a press release Thursday announcing their intent not to again prosecute Edward Wright, Hampden District Attorney Anthony D. Gulluni said the "decision to dismiss the case does not mean that this was a wrongful conviction or that we believe the defendant is innocent."

Instead, he called it "a legal and ethical decision based solely on the reality that, 40 years later, we cannot reconstruct the trial that occurred in 1985."

Though Wright was fully liberated Friday, his attorney Stephanie Roberts Hartung of the New England Innocence Project said his entire adulthood was stolen from him by police and state prosecutors who hid evidence that could have helped prove he was not the person who killed Penny Anderson, 24, in Springfield, Massachusetts.

"What Mr. Wright had been trying to prove, they actually had proof of it in their own files," Hartung said. "The commonwealth has been withholding evidence for years."

Wright was granted a new trial in April after Massachusetts Superior Court Associate Justice Jeremy C. Bucci found prosecutors and police hid exculpatory evidence showing that a break-in had taken place in Anderson's apartment after the murder, compromising the crime scene from which crucial shoe-print evidence was collected.

Wright was the last person to be seen with Anderson, and an acquaintance of his claimed — and then denied — that Wright had confessed to killing a white woman, according to Justice Bucci's order. The court explained that blood inside a car Wright borrowed and a crime-scene shoe print allegedly matching Wright's were also used to prove his guilt.

Justice Bucci called the shoe-print evidence "significant," writing that "it was the only forensic evidence upon which the commonwealth could ask the jury to infer that the defendant's shoes left the bloody footprints and, therefore, that the defendant was the murderer."

Hartung said the new evidence came to light in 2021, when her team made a discovery request and was suddenly faced with pages of documentation that had never been seen before by her client. She said the break-in showed that another person, Anderson's ex-boyfriend, was likely responsible for Anderson's death and chastised the Hampden district attorney for still insisting Wright was guilty.

In Thursday's press release, Gulluni said he was "deeply troubled" by the fact that Wright's conviction, which had been affirmed five times, including by the commonwealth's highest court, could be undone decades later. "It raises important questions about the finality of verdicts and the consistency of our justice system," he said.

However, the main question raised for Hartung was why the state never addressed any of its wrongdoing in this case. "Even once this new information came to light, the commonwealth has never still accepted responsibility for their own agents' conduct," she said.

Justice Bucci wrote that in addition to prosecutors hiding evidence, a detective gave "blatantly false testimony" at trial concerning "evidence central to the prosecution's case." This detective knew about the break-in, but "knowingly misled the jury by testifying falsely" that only police had been on the scene since the murder, the justice's order said. The cover-up of the break-in affected the "only forensic evidence tying [Mr. Wright] to the blood in the apartment," Justice Bucci wrote.

Massachusetts appealed the court's retrial decision but was summarily denied this month by Supreme Judicial Court Justice Serge Georges, according to court records.

Quoting Justice Bucci's order, Gulluni said Wright merely met a "relatively low burden" to justify a retrial, and noted that Justice Bucci himself had called the incriminating evidence against Wright "quite strong."

Wright "received a fair trial in 1985, and multiple courts – including the Supreme Judicial Court – confirmed that fact on five separate occasions," Gulluni said, expressing sympathy for the victim and her family.

Hartung said Wright, who was released in July and sent to prison at age 22, has now lost both his parents and the majority of his life to a wrongful conviction.

After he cut off his ankle monitor himself at the Hampden County Superior Court in Springfield on Friday, Hartung said she joined her client, whom she had represented for 10 years, and had brunch with some of his friends. Though she said he may be eligible for compensation for the time he spent in prison, it won't bring back a lifetime of missed moments.

"Any monetary compensation that he might receive can't come close for the loss of his entire adult life," Hartung said.

--Editing by Linda Voorhis.